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How do I auto-follow Twitter followers?

I have seen a lot of people automatically follow people who follow them on Twitter. That's very cool. How do they do it?


Dave's Answer:

First off, a true confession. I not only do not follow everyone who follows me, but I actually have quite a disparity between the two figures. On my @DaveTaylor account, I have about 1700 followers but only actually follow about 125 people. I'm not sure what that means in terms of Twitter etiquette, but my reasoning is that I follow people whose lives are intertwined with my own. In a word, my friends. Now, there are lots of really cool people and far-flung friends who follow me but whose zeal I don't mirror by following them. That's because in my experience the more people you follow, the greater the distraction of Twitter becomes, and I just don't have the mental bandwidth to keep track of 1700 people. I mean, that's a lot of people!

However, I also completely understand that you see this differently and are more interested in a reciprocal relationship with colleagues, friends and other followers on Twitter. So let's see how you can do this...

To find out, I asked my friend @JoelComm how he has his Twitter account set up and he showed me how he uses the third party service TweetLater.com, coupled with a simple email rule, to follow people who follow him. It's slick, as you'll see.

The initial step, of course, is to sign up for an account at TweetLater.com. Once that's done, you'll be asked to enter your Twitter credentials on this screen:

tweetlater config

Got that set up properly? Did you make sure to check "Automatically follow new followers" as I've highlighted above? Good.

Now, log in to your Twitter account and click on "Settings" then click on the "Notices" tab. You'll see this:

twitter settings notices

As highlighted, you need to ensure you've selected "Email when someone starts following me".

One more step. In your email program you need to set up an autoforward filter rule so that any time you get a notice from Twitter of a new subscriber, it's forwarded to TweetLater.

Since I use Gmail, I do that by clicking on "Settings" then "Filters" within Gmail itself. I create a filter that looks for the phrase "is now following you on Twitter" in the subject:

gmail twitter filter 1

Click on "Next Step" and here's where it gets interesting:

gmail twitter filter 2

As you can see, you simply autoforward matching messages to the email address twitterfollow@tweetlater.com. Save that new filter (by the way, mine is a bit more complex because I also tag invitations with the label "Twitter" and have it skip my inbox. You might opt not to do that on your own account).

Put these three steps together, the configuration on TweetLater, Twitter and your email application, and you're good to go!

Congratulations.

Now, let me go turn this off because I don't actually want to follow everyone who follows me. :-)



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Comments

Dave,

Thanks for the info, but I personally wouldn't recommend the auto-follow. I am starting to get too many spammy follows from either over-zealous Web marketers or perhaps bots who follow 2K, but have a pittance of friends.

Auto-following these people would just clog my twitter feed.

As you say, there's only so many people you can follow well. So why let spammers sneak in there and push legitimate tweets out of the way?

Just my .02.

Posted by: Rich Brooks - flyte at July 24, 2008 10:43 AM

Exactly as Rich said, i would also not recommend this Dave!
As these days there are many bot or spammer members who just follow and never really follow us.. Why do we follow them? Just to read their spam tweets?

You gave a good tutorial for the needful though.

Posted by: Chetan at July 27, 2008 7:26 AM

I've got an even better solution. Here's how to auto-follow your followers on Twitter.

1) Visit http://www.help.twitter.com
2) Put in a request that they turn "auto-follow" on for your account.
3) Wait a couple days for a response
4) Enjoy!

Posted by: Jonathan Coffman at August 1, 2008 9:11 AM

I have a lot to say, but ...
Starbucks coffee cup I have a lot to say, and questions of my own for that matter, but most of all I'd like to say thank you for all your efforts on this Web site by buying you a chai!

I do have a comment, now that you mention it!









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