It was suggested by a few of my readers that I do a counterpart to my post on the Top 10 Signs You’re Not Worth Following on Twitter. It seems it is only fair. After all, I’ve done enough complaining.
So, without further ado, why would I follow you on Twitter?
- You’re interesting. If you talk about things I’m interested in, I’m going to follow you. Seems pretty simple? It is.
- You have a picture. I like following PEOPLE, not crap-colored avatars. A picture of yourself on Twitter means you’re real.
- You’re an opinion leader. If people trust you in your market and what you say is useful and important, I’ll follow you.
- You are retweeted. If people I know and respect are often retweeting you, I consider you important to follow.
- I know you or we’ve met. If I have met you in person at a conference or somewhere else, I’m pretty much guaranteed to follow you.
- You talk back. If I send out a tweet and you reply back fairly routinely, I’ll make sure to follow you because that means we’re engaged in a real conversation.
- You don’t spam. I’m OK with you occasionally promoting your business or your blog posts, but if I see things like how to get more followers or any of the other classic spam, I’m guaranteed to not follow you.
- You make news. I follow @mashable because I like to follow their latest posts. Same with @Techcrunch.
- You follow interesting people. If I see that you follow people I would follow, then I know we have similar interests.
- You interact with others. A parallel to #6, I prefer to follow people who realize that Twitter is a two-way flow. I like to see tweets which are replied to others and otherwise. People who talk and listen.
I still follow some people who don’t fit these criteria. These are people who are still there from the days of auto-following. I’m working on it.


