We’re going to share the policy we’ve been following since our first Tweet in 2010. It works well for us and you can adopt this policy for your personal or food truck account if you wish.
Ready for it?…
We follow everyone back on Twitter (well, almost everyone).
There, that’s our policy short and simple and here’s why we follow it.
For some reason, Twitter limits how many people an account can follow. If you happen to follow a bunch of celebrity chefs and news outlets that don’t follow you back, your account will hit a wall at 2,000 where you find you can’t follow anyone else. So any time you don’t follow someone back, you’re limiting who else they can follow.
When learning about Twitter early on, we found an article that explained that automatically following back is the common ethic of the medium. It’s what you do, it said. This rule has served us well in introducing us to some really great people…many of which have become friends (online and offline).
Much more important, here’s why we follow everyone back: We are not more important than any of our followers. We are grateful every single time someone or some company follows us. It’s their way of saying, “Hey Mobile Cuisine, we want to get to know you better.” For us, to snub this kindness would be ungracious, to say the least.
Following back is consistent with our status as an online trade magazine that covers a service industry. How on earth could we tell food truck owners to provide Five-Star Customer Service, when we are impolite to those kind enough to follow us on Twitter? So for us, it’s an easy decision.
We understand that some of you will find these to be strong words, especially that last part. Let us repeat: this is OUR follow-back policy. These are our reasons. You may have perfectly legitimate reasons for not observing our practices, and they probably work for you and your food truck business.
Remember when we stated we follow “almost everyone”?
When we follow a new person, we typically give them a week, maybe two, to follow us back. If they don’t choose to, that’s perfectly fine. But at that point we typically unfollow them. We literally do not follow a single human who does not follow us as well – at least not for more than a week. No one is that important to me. Now that doesn’t mean we don’t follow food trucks that don’t follow us…we do, do that. We have to…we need to know what’s happening in the industry, and Twitter is one of the source we use for that information.
Alright, that’s our short explanation of our follow-back policy for Twitter. We are very interested in your thoughts and comments. We know this one in particular is not universally agreed upon, so let us have it, if you feel so inclined.