Twitter can be a great marketing tool… but one of the things that has to happen is that people actually follow your feed. Otherwise you will be talking no one, and that is not the way to market yourself or your business After all, the more the merrier.

But have you ever followed someone but they don’t end up following you back? I don’t follow back everyone who follows me, simply because I still want me Twitter feed to be manageable. But ever wonder why some of the people you follow just don’t follow you back? Here are some of the reasons why I don’t immediately follow back people who add me to Twitter.

Who are you?
If you have a blog, give me the URL, but also include it in your bio if you have room. Twitter truncates just about everyone’s URL (unless you have a super short one like @oilman) and sometimes those six characters I get to see of your URL after the http://www. part just doesn’t cut it for me, especially when it seems that half of the people I follow start off with something like http://www.search… Drop the www. part and you will give your potential followers an extra four characters (for a total of ten) to try and figure out what blog is yours without having to mouseover the URL. If I read your blog, you can pretty much guarantee that I will follow you on Twitter too. If your bio is short (like @jenstar) you can also add your website or blog URL at the end of your bio.

Give me a visual
Make sure you either have a photo of yourself, in case I know you from the conference circuit and but don’t realize your handle is actually studmuffin89. Or you can use some other easily recognizable logo (ala @shoemoney) or avatar (ala @doshdosh) that you use not just on Twitter but all the other places I might have seen you (such as on forums or other social media sites).

C’est what?
I seem to have a following of people who must be able to read me in English, but only Twitter in something that I just can’t read. Since I can’t read it, why subscribe? Do you want some of those English followers too? @jdevalk is one I follow that Twitters about half of his updates in English. So in that case, I have no problem following him because I know I can read about half of what he says

Sure, you use Twitterfeed but….
If you have an account you are strictly using as a Twitterfeed “hey we have a new blog post” that no one at the company really follows anyway, why not follow all those people who are following it? Not only will you give people who are following you an extra follower in their list, but the page won’t look so barren when it is missing all those friend icons on the right side. And following lists are set up so you can go and follow all your followers quickly from that page, without having to go and look at each profile individually (unless you want to).

Haven’t updated yet!
If you have signed up for a Twitter account, but have yet to tweet, your Twitter profile page will announce to everyone Haven’t updated yet! And you have to be pretty fabulous for me to follow someone who signed up ages ago but has either said nothing or the last update was over six months ago. The problem with this is that you might be using it to follow people, but when you decide to bite the bullet and actually start tweeting, people just might not even notice because you were formerly a non-tweeter. So if you have signed up but aren’t an active tweeter, try and make a point of saying something – anything – once every week or two, and add it to your calendar to remind you if you need to.

Following too many people
Ever notice those people who are following 3,972 people? Most (although not all) are definite chronic followers, meaning they troll friends of friends and add anyone and everyone, and hope you will follow back. But if you are one of those 3,972 people he or she is following, do you think you will get any benefit from that person? Not a chance. Don’t believe me? Find one of those people who is following 3,000+ people and click on the “with others” tab, and you will discover that by the time you scroll to the end of the page of updates, you are still looking at people who have only twittered within the last minute. Do you think he/she will have noticed what you tweeted 20 minutes ago? Not likely. That said, I do follow those who are following thousands, but those tend to be those who are extremely well known, such as @jasoncalacanis.

Who are you @ with?
If I look at your profile and see that you are sending @ messages to people I already follow, your odds of me following you just went up exponentially. So there is value in interesting with others on Twitter by sending them @ messages, because not only can I see that you are following (and actively participating) followers of mine, but you will also get more followers if that person you just @ with ends up @ you back in his or her own messages. And if it happens to be at a conference, and it is obvious from your own tweets or other people’s @ tweets that you are there too, your odds of being followed just went up exponentially again.

Lastly, don’t take it personally if people don’t follow you back right away. I often go through the list of people who have followed me once every week or two (I am hoping to go through mine in the next day or two, before I leave for SES, if you are wondering why I haven’t followed you back yet!) and add people at that time, rather than doing it multiple times a day as people follow me. It is easy to quickly sort the email notices I received, since Twitter doesn’t offer any kind of sorting function yet to sort my followers by date they began following me.

Also read: Ten ways market your blog on Twitter without being a spammer.

Follow me on Twitter: @jenstar

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