Should I follow everyone on Twitter who follows me? Last week I gained a new follower – someone who was following 300,000 other accounts. This tells me something about the way he uses Twitter: he’s not reading anything those people post. Often these accounts belong to marketers for whom Twitter is a low-priced ad channel and a sales tool. Such an advertiser vanishes if you don’t follow back.
In my opinion, reading and commenting on other people’s tweets are at least as important as sharing your own. I still consider Twitter as a news source and a learning environment, so I prefer to follow those who share my interests. Inevitably this means I’ll miss many good content providers, but I need to manage the overall stream of messages. If you follow everyone, the message stream will inundate you.
In Twitter’s early days, I said I could keep up with maybe 400. Only after several years did I gradually increase that number, and now I can deal with about a thousand accounts quite well. I don’t really think it’s possible to read the tweets of a much larger number that you follow–not if you have anything else to do in your life. You can of course mute accounts that are uninteresting, but then what’s the point of following them?