@julia_cortez1 made some really smart suggestions. I had not thought of this but then I thought, Twitter has some really smart people too and all they do is work on issues like this. Why have they not thought of it? I think it is safe to say they have.
I think we are seeing the need to monetize Twitter becoming a priority and the fact is big business buys ads. Small Businesses in general have to date shown much less aptitude to buy such ads. Big business has no problem to increase their payroll by 0.02% and hire a person to perform this function. SMB’s however have a hard time increasing their payroll by 14% for the same results. Spam driven automation sucks. We all agree on that. I would like to know the exact count of people who followed someone and that resulted in them being followed back and that made them feel like they were spammed.
My guess is that, not a single person has ever followed someone and had then had them follow them back in itself creating a bad UX on the Twitter platform. In fact, if asked “do you like it when the brands you follow, follow you back?” almost everyone would say yes.
My honest guess is as this policy only stands to lower the overall UX, it is a result of negotiations for a large ad buy or part of plan to sell large corporations on the new value proposition created by leveraging the platform to their benefit. That or Twitter will start selling this service after the dust clears. We have used auto follow back for about half of our 9,000 that we currently follow. They say it is to protect the content of our home page but the fact is, and I see it right now, the people who follow me have the content I like to find and now instead of enjoying this content, I will spend what little time I already available for it hitting a button over and over again in a mindless fashion that any monkey (or api calling script) could easily do.
With social media ROI already a tough sell that is hard to justify with the SMB I think Twitter just made it one part more expensive and one step further from justifiable ROI. Therefore, making their own ads that much less attractive. We have planned and financed our first Twitter paid campaign to start September 3rd. We have informed the client that changes to the Twitter api have now taken Twitter back down to the questionable ROI category. We proactively moved this spend elsewhere as who wants to buy a bunch of followers from Twitter if it means you are going to have to sit at a computer for hours and follow them back one by one.
We rep brands and we are a brand. As a brand you do not pick and choose who you like. A brand who makes public votes as to who they like and do not like is costing itself money on a regular basis. It is not usually smart to even cast political votes but when you start segmenting your customer base into a liked and disliked column you are going to have issues. I think our best bet is to un-follow everyone and simply not follow people on Twitter anymore. I think a lot of small brands will have to now adopt this strategy. I will have to read the doc on this again to understand how not following anyone is going to make my Twitter UX better.
