11 Reasons Why People Don't Follow Back on Twitter

You do everything right in Twitter. So why are some people not following you back? It’s not you. (Well, maybe in the rare situation when someone truly doesn’t like you. Even the nicest people don’t have a fan in a person or two.) Doing Twitter right means you …

• Mix up your tweets (retweets, replies, original messages and links).
• Take care in promoting your own stuff.
• Don’t spam.
• Have a nice follower and following ratio.
• Share insights.
• Spotlight others in a genuine way.
• Have a complete profile that includes a bio, avatar, link and location.

Good for you. That’s all you can do to encourage people to follow you and stick with you. Yet, you still won’t always make the cut. I have plenty of good Twitter users who don’t follow me back or decide to stop following me and I am OK with that. Even I don’t follow back people with thousands of followers. If you work hard enough and long enough, you too, can have loads of followers without producing good quality tweets.
Why would people not follow back a good Twitter user? The first thing to understand about Twitter is that we have different goals of what we want to do with it. In other words, five people could use Twitter in different ways and they’re all doing it right. Here are the possible reasons:

1. They follow specific topics or careers: One client follows only those involved the Intranet, internal communications and enterprise communications. Another follows only those who are writers, editors and publishers.
2. They want to limit their tweet stream: There’s no rule of thumb on how often to tweet. Some do 20+ tweets a day and others do just two tweets a day. Not everyone wants a flooded Twitter stream. So they limit their follows to the people they like, admire and respect.
3. They don’t know you’re following them: Some folks opt not to receive an email every time they gain a new follower. They also don’t review their “followers” list. Who has time for that?
4. They follow only people they know offline: While we can make friends and acquaintances online, some prefer not to venture that far and stick close to home with people they already know.
5. They just started using Twitter: Few figure out Twitter in an instant, so they’re not sure how they want to use Twitter or exactly how it works.
6. They may not know they stopped following you: Twitter isn’t perfect. I’ve followed people only to find out later that I stopped following them due to a Twitter quirk. Several of us swore that we thought we were already following each other.
7. They thought they were already following you: Unless you follow fewer than 100 people, very few study their followers and make sure they stay connected. So it’s easy to overlook someone. The fastest way to see if someone follows you is to look on their Twitter page for “message” under “Actions.” If it’s not there, they’re not following you. You can send a gentle tweet or email them privately letting them know that you can’t send DMs because they’re not following you. It’s OK. Many of us appreciate that.
8. They have millions of followers: These folks tend to be the celebrities or people with popular web sites (Oprah, Ashton Kutcher, Cakewrecks and Mashable). They know they can’t keep up and operate differently from the rest of us.
9. They didn’t like your introductory direct message (DM): Some people automatically respond to every new follower with a direct message while others send annoying (yes, they annoy a lot of folks) ones like: “Thanks for following me.” “I hope to get to know you.” “You can learn more about me at my blog.”
10. They were tired of your reciprocal tweets: On #followfridays, you list a bunch of names and not much else. Or you thank every single person for retweeting (RT) or mentioning you. Some people love it. Some people hate it.
11. They never heard from you: The other person is one of those who DMs everyone and if they don’t hear back, they unfollow. Or they RT something you said and never got a thank you from you.

Again, you and I have different rules and expectations when it comes to Twitter. While I follow one rule, you may break it, and in reverse. Conversation quality is what makes the Twitter experience. Not numbers. Not who follows you.
We can’t control who follows us (aside from the occasional nudge) or adds us to one of their lists. We CAN control who we follow. In rare cases, the decision to not follow you is a personal one — but most of the time it’s not.
What rules do you have for using Twitter?