How do I autofollow in Twitter?
By Michael W. Jones
If you wish to automatically follow everyone that follows you on Twitter, there are a number of third-party services that make that possible, though Twitter no longer allows the practice directly, for good reasons.
Before going a great deal further, we should note that Twitter co-founder Biz Stone sent out an email on March 31, 2009 announcing that Twitter was turning off the autofollow feature on its site. It was never available to most members anyhow, and Stone said that he felt the use of the feature sends the wrong message. However, unless and until Twitter shuts down their API to third-party services that use it to accomplish auto-follow, it will still be possible to use the technique, although almost certainly not wise.
For those of you that don’t know, “autofollow” is a method that one can use to automatically follow everyone that follows you, now and in the future. Some people see this as polite, believing that it is gauche to allow someone to look at all of their tweets without reciprocating. Others, of course, feel that it is too hard to follow huge numbers of people, especially when some of them may be spam or bots. Imagine following every spambot that chooses to follow you. It may be wiser to select some middle, and more useful ground.
Because of Stone’s change in policy, you will need to go to a site other than Twitter to arrange for autofollow. Sites that will help you accomplish this include the following two:
Of these, Twollow is by far the most popular, and offers an interesting twist on the autofollow concept, so we will look at how to to get a special sort of autofollow working via their site.
First, of course, you need to go to Twollow.com and sign in with your Twitter username and password. What Twollow does is allow you to follow people that mention certain keywords in their tweets. This could really be useful. As an example, you could follow people that mention your product name, or the name of your Web site. That is certainly better than just following everyone, or everything, that decides to follow you.
When you have signed into the Twollow.com site, you are presented with a screen area that will allow you to select the keywords that you wish to have trigger the autofollow mechanism. That screen looks like this:
Using the text box marked “New keyword:” enter a keyword that you want to use. We’ll use the keyword Blorge as an example. Then click the box marked “Auto-follow” so that a check-mark appears in it, and select a “Maximum to follow per update” in that dropdown box, either 5, 10, or 15. Then click on the command button “Monitor keyword.”
The bottom of the entry screen area will then change to reflect your entry. In our case, the following is what appeared.
The warnings / instructions given by this site about even this limited sort of autofollow are instructive, to say the least, about the autofollow feature. Here is what Twollow says about its own service:
Please be careful with the Auto Follow feature, we provide safety mechanisms to ensure you will not follow excessive people for popular keywords. We suggest you select your auto follow keywords with caution.
We will monitor your keywords and let you choose which people you want to follow. By clicking on a keyword you’ll access the last tweets that contains the keyword and will be able to follow people you want.
When Twollow finds a tweet that contains your keyword, the user making that tweet will be shown on the Twollow site and you can decide whether or not to follow that twitter user. At the very least, you will be able to find out what was said about your keyword. And that is a lot more useful than autofollowing a spambot that wants to sell you printer ink, or worse.
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on Saturday, April 4th, 2009 at 4:07 pm
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