When I wrote the last post, ‘To follow, or not to follow - That is the question‘, I was completely oblivious about the fact that Twitter actually has enforced a new policy regarding how many people you can follow per day. According to the new policy, you can follow a maximum of 1000 new people per day.

In relation to this new policy, the awesome marketing blog DoshDosh posted a blog post titled ‘Twitter Marketing: Why You Don’t Need to Mass Follow Users‘ that details a few very valid points about why you don’t have to mass follow users.

Another person who also got an opinion about this is Tim O’Reilly who says the following in the upcoming Twitter book:

If you want tons of followers on Twitter, you’re not alone. But here’s a secret: a small number of great followers is much more valuable than a herd of uninterested people.

Think about it this way: if you’re an accountant twittering about tax tips, what’s the point of having 1,000 followers if 999 of them are spam bots and war resistors who don’t file taxes? — Tim O’Reilly

When it all comes down to it, having great followers always beats having heaps of followers. There’s no question about it. But the question is how you should start out building this great network - you still have to find these great followers somehow.

I believe that automatically following a few hundred or even thousand people that match your interests (for example, searching http://search.twitter.com/ for a key word or hash tag) will get you started out fairly quickly. From there you can start narrowing down the people that are providing value in the network and find related interesting people. Hand picking all your followers will of course lead to a more targeted network, but it will also take a lot more time and energy on your part.

I’m not saying that you should go absolutely bonanza and follow 14,000ish people like I do, but doing a bit of key word based auto-following using for example Twollow will not hurt you. You can always unfollow people that aren’t providing value to you.