I know being picky about who I follow can lose me followers, however, I do not just follow anyone who follows me. I am more likely to follow someone who randomly tweets me about a subject I love and has a one to two hour conversation with me than someone who follows me and says nothing to me.
2 My checklist
* I look at who we both follow in common. I want to know what interests we share. If we have nothing in common, I do not know where to start a conversation with you. I look to see if we have five or more interests in common.
* I look at who we both have following us in common. If you are a friend of a friend, there is a better chance that I will follow you back.
* I look at your mini-bio. I know that it may sound odd that I look at that later, however, the people with whom we are both involved tells me a lot more than 160 characters can tell me most of the time.
* I look to see if you sent me a tweet or at least mentioned me. I will not follow anyone who does not tweet, as it seems a little pointless. If you are not going to say anything, why would you need followers? Also, sending me a tweet shows you followed me without the help of any robots.
* I look at your previous open tweets.
I would rather follow someone with whom I have people or interests in common, who is excited by what we have in common, and who will talk directly to me about the person or interest. Twitter is a social network so be sociable. :)
PS. There may be a little interview. The above does not always protect me from annoyances.
PPS. If you subscribe to a lot of my lists, I may follow you since you've shown me how much we have in common.
2 Why I do not follow back
* 0 tweets - If you do not tweet anything, do you need followers?
* Mostly non-English tweets - I read English and a little German, so I will not follow someone whose tweets I can not read unless the person tweets to me in English.
* Your account is protected - I can not see who or what we have in common nor read your tweets. How am I supposed to get to know you when you hide?
* I will not follow obvious bots or spammers.
* If I can not determine a person is a child, I will avoid following that person. A child is anyone under the age of 18.
* If we have nothing obviously in common, I will not follow that person unless I am proven wrong.
* Anyone who follows more than 5,000 people. If you are following so many, can you even see my tweets mixed in with the others?
* If all I see is retweets and likes in your timeline, it tells me you have few original thoughts to share.
* Anyone who begs for followers in their mini-bios. I do not want to be bothered with tweets of people begging for followers. The hashtags “#Ifollowback”, “#Teamfollowback”, or similar will automatically disqualify you as a friend of mine.