Within the Twitter community some users seem to have the attitude of, “follow me back or I will unfollow you”. Are we obliged to follow someone for no reason other than they are following us? I think not.

I follow Twitter users whom post content about things that interest me…I seriously don’t mind if they don’t follow me back…I may not be posting things of interest to them. That’s not to say I’m not appreciative of the return follow but to me that’s not what Twitter is about.

There are many Twitter users following thousands and thousands of people for whatever reason, that’s cool but for me I like to read as many of the posts I can. How could I possibly do this if I had thousands of followers posting several posts each a day? Twitter lists assist with this in a way but I intend to keep my followings manageable though I’m not naive to the possibility that this could one day go out the window.

There have been times I’ve blocked some followers because I believed they had ulterior motives or I didn’t believe they were legit or weren’t who they said they were.

I did a repost of Clive Thompson’s awhile back where he talked about ‘Online Obscurity‘. He stated, “When you go from having a few hundred Twitter followers to ten thousand, something unexpected happens: Social networking starts to break down”. There is some truth in that. A community can become so big that the sense of community becomes lost. So I refrain from following users that twitter ‘status type’ postings only, unless they’re a friend or an associate of mine. I prefer to use Twitter to gain information and knowledge of my specific interests.

Some users appear to follow people as a means of getting more followers for themselves. However, I find if I don’t return the favour, they unfollow me with hours or within a day or two. There are plenty of people I’m following that don’t follow me and they probably never will. Good on them.

When someone chooses to follow me, I view their profile to see if they’re posting things of interest to me, if they do, I follow, if not, I don’t.

Some people find it hard to accept loss of followers and take it personally. I’ve had incidences where I’ve followed people after viewing their profile only to have them unfollow me almost immediately. These users, at most times, appear to be people who are only interested in using Twitter to build up their contact base for selling their services or products. They have no interest in hearing what you have to say, they are usually just spammers. Twitter often weeds out spam accounts and bots that automatically follow people which would make your user numbers drop. So chances are, those followers weren’t real people anyway.

There’s plenty of blogs and resources on the net if you suffer from follower loss. Also, the same goes for tracking lost followers.