Think of this for a moment: you are in a room full of hi-fi equipment and each of them is playing a different music genre. You love pop music but it is difficult for you to listen to it since the room is full of loud noise. Heavy metal, Mozart, country and so on. You can barely hear some music that you really like.
Did you get it? The example above gives you a pretty good idea on what Twitter is. It is up to you to make the content you like stand out from the noise so that you can fully take advantage of it. If your Twitter stream is full of messages coming from people who are not really interesting for you, you are likely to lose a lot of interesting stuff and get mostly noise.
You should also take into account how Twitter and its APIs work: a desktop/mobile client, for instance, can retrieve only the last X messages from your stream in a certain moment. Most of the times you only take a look at that content so you are renouncing to other content you couldn’t retrieve because of technical limitations. What if you just lost an important news? You wouldn’t have missed it if you’d have downloaded more content coming from the right users only.
It’s pretty clear what the point is: auto-following or, in general, following back everyone who follows you is definitely something you should avoid if you want to get the most out of Twitter. If I love photography not necessarily the users I follow who share with me the same interest are, on the contrary, interested in VoIP. They could be outstanding photographers and I want to read, learn and share, but why shouldn’t they fill their Twitter stream with my tweets that are rarely about photography?
People who follow each other are more likely to participate in discussions and interact since they have common interests but sometimes I just want to “listen” to something I’m interested in. At the same time, there could be people interested in what I’m saying but the opposite couldn’t be always true.
If you want to get the most out of Twitter, avoid auto-following or following back EVERY user who follows you, but take the time, when you can, to review each of your followers one at a time. It’s definitely worth it.
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