There have been quite a few posts written recently on the subject of building your Twitter following. There is one strategy in particular which seems to be the source of some controversy. That is the strategy of following other users, involved in niches similar to yours, with the hope that they will follow you in return. I like to call this kind of follow, a reciprocal follow.  Some people have been advising Twitter users to use this technique while others have suggested avoiding it like the plague.

Maki of DoshDosh recently wrote a post on the subject of building your Twitter following. In the post one of the strategies suggested is to use your existing presence on other social networking sites such as Facebook or MySpace, as a means of promoting your Twitter profile. This is a great strategy for all those who already have a sizable presence on another social networking site.

If however you are just starting out in online business, effectively employing such a strategy might be harder to pull off. Business trends move in cycles, and sites that where once considered hot beds for marketing through social networking such as Facebook and MySpace may have cooled down in comparison to some up and coming sites such as Twitter.

With this in mind, if you are a new kid on the block, Twitter may be one of the places you decide to make your first stand. The downside of course of using the reciprocal follow technique is that some may view the tactic as spam. Certainly if you decide to follow several thousand Twitter users in a single sitting, most people will view that as spam.

I would suggest that there is a happy middle ground between following thousands of Twitter profiles in one sitting and not using the reciprocal follow technique at all. Say that you set a modest goal for yourself like gaining 50 new reciprocal followers a week.

You could use your IM client to track Tweets in niches related to yours and follow say 250 of these users. Since it’s not unusual to get 10% of your follows to reciprocate in 3 days time, you could expect an extra 25 followers on your account. Since this cycle only takes 3 days you could easily fit two cycles in a week. Please keep in mind that weekends on Twitter seem to be a little slower than weekdays, so you might want to factor that into your scheduling.

After each three day cycle is up, check out the profiles of those that did not follow you in return. If there are any that interest you, keep following them. I would suggest that, for the time being, you stop following the rest. You should avoid the situation is which you follow many times the number of people that follow you.

In addition to the obvious benefit of growing your following, reciprocal follows come with an added bonus benefit. When I post a link back to my site announcing a new post I usually get between 1-2% of my followers clicking through to my site. When I add a group of new followers I usually get between 3-4% of the users I just added, clicking through to my site.

It’s important to consider the benefits that your followers gain when they engage in a reciprocal follow with you. Not only do you gain the right to communicate with them but they gain the right to communicate, and if they wish market, to you. So a reciprocal follow can be a symbiotic relationship with benefits to both parties.

Some have argued that if you are deemed by Twitter to be a spammer you may be putting your Twitter account at risk. Once again I think that there is a big difference between following 2,000 profiles at a time or 250. Indeed the “reciprocal follow” strategy might be a risk, but some… especially those just starting out, might view it as a risk worth taking.

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This entry was posted on Friday, May 23rd, 2008 at 6:59 am by Phil Weslow and is filed under Strategy, Twitter. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.