Robb Montgomery

Is it ethical for newsrooms and journalists to use “autofollow” scripts to inflate the followers of their Twitter accounts?
Please answer my poll.

Autofollow and the gaming of Twitter by journalists

If you are a standup for the little guy reporter or newsroom. Is it a good idea to game the Twitter system using bots, scripts or services to blindly add followers?

I have been teaching Twitter tactics to print reporters recently in Philadelphia and St. Louis and it never fails that one of the first questions from a scribe is “How do I get a lot of followers?”

Yikes. I understand that reporters new to Twitter might want to start out being followed by as many people. But put your ego aside.
It is better to gain followers by understanding the nature of the Twitter environment and being a good resource first and foremost.
It is better to be followed for the right reasons and to be followed by the right people (your community) than be led astray trying to attract as many Twitter followers as possible.

Here is my Twitter maxim
You don’t use Twitter to reach an audience - you use it to build and serve a community.

Can you really follow 7,000 people?
I won’t reveal some of the black hat ways you can automate the following process - that’s not the point of this post. But rather, ask yourself the next time you see a Twitter persona for a newsroom that has let’s say 8,000 followers and this persona also “Follows” 7,000 to 8,000 people.

I agree - I only follow interesting people who are sharing good content and engage me and colleagues in interesting conversations.

If you find yourself ‘following’ 7,000 people - get real.
You are not really ever following what your tweeps are saying by reading their updates in your timeline. Nobody could keep up in a meaningful way.
The key to find Twitter value is to communicate with your community on the open channel.
Can’t do that if you can only keep up with @replies and direct messages.

If you want a million followers - hire this kid who got hundreds of thousands of followers of CNN’s breaking news alerts by writing five lines of Ruby code. He was smart enough to get CNN to buy him out for the transfer of the account.

Here’s the answer to the ethics poll from above. Thanks for voting!