I know this is not something most of those who have been on twitter for a while would do. Right? However, I have seen twitter newbies do this and it is really not the way to manage your followers on twitter.

There is really no good reason to use the auto-follow feature on twitter or on some of the twitter applications. Especially on your personal or main business account. If you check your new followers at all, you are going to see there is a large number of spammers and crap on twitter. And you don’t want any of that in your main twitter stream.

When I get a new follower on twitter, I have it set to send me an email telling me about it. I always go check the new follower out. I look at all of those things we have talked about in previous post in this series, here and here. And I am not afraid to block new followers if they are spam or just plain crap. You will be amazed at some of the stuff you get in your new followers.

In order to back up my own position on this topic, I decided to run a new poll yesterday as indicated below. Once again I used twtpoll and it is a great tool. You need to try it if you haven’t.

Here is the question and the results of the poll.

It was interesting yesterday getting some of the comments on twitter about the poll and the ongoing results. One person was a bit surprised and pleased at the same time of the results. I was too. I was actually surprised that the number of those following me and taking the poll came out so strongly on the side of not auto-following. Surprised mainly because I know a lot of those in my twitter followers and those I follow are very busy running businesses and professional service firms. Even they indicated auto-follow is not the way to go.