Since forever, John Chow has been praising and preaching the idea of following everyone on Twitter who follows you, in order to avoid “negative social proof”,  whatever that is. He went so far as to make a whole website dedicated to getting you more followers, as long as you follow them back (much like the MySpace whore trains).
Now suddenly, he’s backflipped and seen the error of this theory that we’ve known all along; that it’s pointless, unmanageable, and serves no purpose but to put a large number on your profile.

I started Twitter with no followers whatsoever, and spent my time just tweeting what I wanted, and following people I found interesting. From there, everything grew on it’s own. There was no need to spam people with requests to follow back, or direct messages thanking them, or anything like that (though to be honest for a while I did thank people…). I’m sure a lot of others are the same, right?

Ok, so I made a post around a week ago which briefly summed up my following habits on Twitter. However, no more than a day after writing that, I found myself going against what I said, and followed an additional 50 people who were following me. At first I contemplated deleting that post and pretending it never happened, but I made a promise to myself when I made the blog that I wouldn’t delete [many] articles, and to instead just write a new post.
I’ve started going through everyone I myself follow, looking at each profile and seeing if that person is to me, worth following. I’ve been looking at:

• The number of tweets, because why would I follow someone with absolutely no tweets?
• The quality of tweets. I don’t like the idea of following someone who only tweets ads, or affiliate links, nor the idea of someone who tweets short simple sentences ALL THE TIME like “Going home”, “Eating”, etc. What are you eating? Is it good?
• Website. While this really doesn’t change anything about whether I follow you or not, I like seeing if people have a good website. I’m a sucker for blogs. And speaking of the general information area, your
• bio needs to be there; no bio, most likely no follow. And then, if I see on there talk of marketing, then I will shun you. And from what I hear from everyone else when they complain about this, not many other people like it either.

And that’s pretty much it. I’ve found myself suddenly going from following sixty to one hundred and forty people really quickly, and it’s slightly overwhelming, even at such a small number, but that’s a story for another time.