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Follow for follow, and why I don’t do it

Tea Spangsberg

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.

Anete Lusina from Unspalsh
(I want to say that I have no problem with people who do it, and I know that it works wonders for some people. This is just my views and explanation on 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

Love, Tea

28 thoughts on “Follow for follow, and why I don’t do it”

  5. 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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  6. 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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  7. 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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  8. 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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  9. 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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  11. 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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  12. 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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  13. 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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  15. 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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