You should seriously consider effectively communicating with the people that follow you on Twitter.

There's a twitter account called RU4real that claims to be an experiment. Here's the only thing they've tweeted:

DO NOT FOLLOW THIS ACCOUNT. It is an experiment to see how many people read the pages of the people they follow. You are a tool.

The problem is that this experiment isn't proving anything other than that people out there are using things like TweetLater, an excellent utility that allows you to automatically follow anyone that follows you. You can send a nice little direct message to your new follower as well.

Most people seem to auto-respond with something along the lines of "Hi! Thanks for the follow. Look forward to seeing your tweets!" While that's certainly cordial of them, I think they're missing out on a great opportunity. Someone has contacted you with a follow, and you'll get their attention for 140 characters. Why not use an automated message along the lines of:

Thanks for the follow. Please consider http://feeds.feedburner.com/PromoteMySite for your reader, you'll enjoy it.

We've been using our Greasemonkey Twitter Script and over the last week Oliver and I have picked up about 800 new followers. Getting into even a small percentage of those follower's daily read can have long term benefits for your site. (Watch the twitter video on the Promote-My-Site YouTube channel)

The same tactic will work on other social networks as well. One of the nice features of our PMS Social Suite is that you can select everybody that recently became one of your fans and send them a shout. It's the "Welcome to being my fan" shout. Ask them to vote your favorites, point them at your blog, whatever. Just be sure to take advantage of taking part of the conversations that you're trying so hard to start.

Perhaps some of the people that are following ru4Real got there because they've been following a random strategy of following anybody and everybody. If they'd been using our Greasemonkey script, they would have unfriended ru4Real because they didn't become mutual. Their reward for the bad strategy of not using our script is to be "A Tool".