Today I want to talk about a subject that can be a bit controversial. The follow for follow, a very popular way of growing your numbers on Twitter and Instagram, and why I don’t do it.
When I see people who have 10.000 followers and follow 10.000 people, there’s always a few things coming to mind. Of which the first one always is that their feed must be filled with so much “noise”.
With noise I mean things that honestly doesn’t hold their interest.
When I get a new follower, I always always go to their profile and read it. I look at their content to see if it holds my interest, and then decide if I want to follow back.
Sometimes they just don’t share interests with me at all, but sometimes I find they are homophobic, overly religious or just nasty people, and I have no interest in following people like that and have them show up in my friend list or my feed.
I try very hard to make sure that my feed is filled with things that holds my interest and/or brings me joy. This also means that I do unfollow people if they start posting content that either just is too far from my interests or start to show a side I can’t agree with.
And I honestly hope people do the same with me. I would rather have that my audience enjoys what I post than ignore it and scroll on. And with that, have you showed the people you follow some love today?
Do you follow for follow or not, and why? Let me know in the comments
Nice looking Blog. Really nice.
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Thank you
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This is the perfect way to follow bloggers ❤️🙌
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Exactly! Great post.
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Thank you 😊
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Well said!
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Thank you
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Great little read. I totally agree with you on the subject. I don’t do the follow for follow thing, it doesn’t interest me at all. I want to grow my audience organically because I’ve worked hard and people enjoy my content. I also don’t want to fill my feeds with content I’m not truly interested in.
Kate | thelittlecrunch.co.uk
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I do follow for follow very occasionally if I’m taking part in Instagram threads and things like that. But it’s rare. I don’t follow everyone back for the sake of it on a normal day. I remember years ago when I was super obsessed with Instagram followers (on an old account) I’d do the F4F thing loads with random people – makes me cringe just to think about it!
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No I do not! And I’ve been unfollowed by people who expected it. I stay away from threads that require me to follow all or comment all or share all as well.
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I don’t for pretty much these reasons. If they’ve found me because we have things in common, then great, and I’m up for following them back. But if I have no idea why they’ve followed me, what their interests are etc, then that’s not something I can engage with. Great post!
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Great post! And I do the same as you. I rarely follow just to follow (only if I participate in certain threads). I try to follow only people who I have things in common.
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I completely agree I don’t do follow for follow but don’t have a problem if people do it. I’d rather have people interested in my content follow me, rather than just to get followers!
Jared Davies | http://www.jareddavies.co.uk
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For me, it depends on who it is. I tend to want to support other bloggers so I follow back unless their blog is about something that, like you’ve said, I’d find offensive in my feed or totally uninteresting. When it comes to non-bloggers, I try to follow people back that I would find interesting or funny, or whose posts I’d like to see. I also occasionally follow someone with random interests so that I get a bit of diversity in post content on my feed.
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I found that the time I did follow for a follow those which seemed a bit meh usually were the people who’d do follow for a follow, unfollow tactics so now if something’s far from what I do I’m like nope (I mean I appreciate if is someone does something different that I’m not that interested in and still likes what I do). Sometimes I do follow back related content that I might not do if I was organically searching for people then I find I’m updating my follow list and trying to figure out which ones I followed because I want to see more and which ones followed me for my follow and then unfollowed. Bit of a battle to figure out what am I genuinely interested in and who got extra attention through ungenuine twitter tactics. I don’t really search for people just to follow for that reason so idk it’s a bit frustrating to clean the feed up.
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I recommend using tweet sponge. It allows you to see people who unfollow you, follow you and so on. It’s a great way to weed out the follow/unfollow people
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I tend to stay well away from it myself… like you, I only want to be connected to people or topics that I feel I’m happy to see in my feeds.
I thought about it a lot when I first started out but decided against it because a follow for follow is never going to be worth anything down the line. I feel it’s much better to engage with people you have something in common with and vice-versa.
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Exactly. And honestly, I find that a lot of the follow for follow are in fact follow for follow then unfollow, because people just want to grow their numbers.
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It’s so important that your feed is filled with like minded people so im definitely in agreement that we dont need to follow everyone back! Great post x
https://www.femaleoriginal.com
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thank you
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When I first started blogging I used to follow absolutely everyone back just to be nice and very quickly realised I engaged with about 2% of my feed and didn’t recognise so many faces so I stopped and slowly started unfollowing people that I saw as ‘noise’ and I’m much happier with my feeds now. It’s kinda funny when people unfollow when you don’t follow them back though x
Sophie
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Hehe yes it is. And you see the same faces pop up as “followed you” 2 hours later “unfollowed you”. and next day its a repeat.
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At the beginning on Twitter I used to follow follow pretty much but then I quickly realised that my feed was a little junky – Now I am a little more judicious.
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Yeah, and I admit I have no problem unfollowing someone if they suddenly begin sharing nasty stuff or spamming the feed with weird shit. I don’t have time for that.
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Why shouldn’t you (unfollow) boundaries and standards are important
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Yes ❤
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If it’s a nice blog or social media I will follow back, if people have thousands of followers and only follow a couple I don’t tend to do that as I know people will do the follow unfollow thing x
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Yes. I follow if i like the content 🙂
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I think you make an outstanding point in this post. The idea of follow trains, and the follow for follow mentality is ludicrous when you think about it. It’s nothing but emptiness in reality.
Rob | https://supportmidlands.co.uk/
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So much emptiness
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