I found that some people would follow back after the second time I followed them.  Assumed the email we get was the reminder, soon buried under more recent ones. The theory has worked, with people I know who are less tech savvy.

This strategy, of unfollowing people who don’t follow you back works great—for twitterers like FollerBackGirl (following 4,050; followed by 3,688). I created FollerBackGirl to demonstrate the irrelevance of Twitter followers by quickly finding a large number of people who will follow anything that follows them back.

Following only people who follow you back is a good way to keep up with everything FollerBackGirl and her followers are doing, and to accumulate more worthless followers.

Unfollowing those who don’t follow you back is a flawed strategy for any other purpose.

I don’t read 90% of what the people I follow write. I couldn’t possibly—I’m following more than 200 people. And I don’t respond to 90% of what I do read—I couldn’t do that without hiring a GhostTwitterer. So 90% of the time Twitter is something less than a one-way conversation, and 1% of the time it’s something more. I respond to less than one tweet in a hundred from the timeline of people I follow. If I followed everyone who followed me, I wouldn’t read 5% of what the people I followed wrote or respond to one tweet in 200+.

I also don’t give what someone charmingly called the reacharound followback. I don’t follow my followers back just because they follow me.

More interesting is better than more followers. The Twitter Interesting Index v1 is the number of followers a person has, divided by the number of people he follows (v2 will be recursive, so that being followed by more-interesting people increases your Interesting Index more). A person gets more followers than he follows by being interesting. @ScottGreenfield, for example, has a TII-1 of 36.5. @WestWingReport has a TII-1 of 29.8. @ChrisPirillo has a TII-1 of 115.9. All of these people are worth following, unless your rule for whether to follow someone includes “does he follow me back?”

Here’s my strategy: If I see a retweet of something that makes me say, “I’m glad I didn’t miss that!” I’ll look up the twitterer and, if he’s often interesting, follow him.

If I see that someone has followed me, I’ll look at his TII-1. If it’s less than 1 and she is not a total noob, I won’t even bother reading her tweets. Otherwise I’ll look at her last 20 or so twits, and if I see something that makes me say “I’m glad I didn’t miss that” I’ll follow her.

I follow interesting people. Whether they follow me back is unimportant. In educating and entertaining me, they’re giving me a gift. Expecting them to follow me back as well would be not only counterproductive, but also churlish.