Since the dawn of Twitter for business it has been hotly debated whether it is best to follow everyone who follows you on Twitter.
Consider this - as effective networkers, something that every small business should be doing, we know that reaching out to peers with our message of what we can do and how we can help our fellow networkers is essential in building rapport and marketing our USP's.
Twitter can also be valuable as a networking tool to reach out to your peers in business. Effective networkers appreciate that you are not just networking with the room, but using those people to get to their contacts, you don’t know who they know. So it might be worth having a look to see how many followers a ‘stranger’ has before you decide to follow them or not.
Isn't it good manners to follow back?
Long gone is the 'courtesy follow', where you simply click through because they followed your business. Before long, your feed could be full of 'noise' and irrelevant tweets that effectively swallow up the relevant and useful messages, but you may also come across random nuggets of Twitter gold!
Take President Obama, for example, @BarackObama had over 57 million followers at one point. Admirable you might say, but where the President is a popular figure to many folk, these citizens are not necessarily worthy of a follow from the President of The United States of America, however courteous he may be.
But, a far cry from leader of the US, your small business may choose to follow everyone in order to give them an opportunity to contact you and engage in your content. Direct messages were until recently only possible if you mutually followed each other, so you may have been cutting off a vital method of contact if you haven't followed back.
If you tweet regularly you should already be interspersing promotion with social style tweets and interactions and therefore sharing your contact details with a social element, so perhaps this is how you prefer your followers to get in touch.
Be authentic
Whatever you decide, whether it is a selective method of following only what appears to be relevant people and businesses, or whether it's a courteous manner with which you build your connections, be authentic. Always thank your new followers and re-tweeters and reply to mentions with a personal touch and you will find that Twitter is an excellent aid to engaging with your customer base and business connections.
People appreciate a personal touch and level of engagement with your business and Twitter is the perfect way to bring your personality and ethics into light. Authenticity is the key to building rapport here, not a robotic, scatter gun style of advertising.
