If you enjoyed my Twitter follow policy, here’s some insight as to how it works in real life.

When I receive a bunch of Twitter follow notices, I first scan them for any people I actually know. Of the remainder, if some include keywords of interest to me (e.g., on the environment, ethics, or marketing), I’m fairly likely to click over and have a look. And I confess, if someone has an exotic name, I may visit just to see where they’re from and who they are. For the rest, I’ll open a few at random.

Today, I opened three. The first had nearly 14,000 followers, and if I were motivated only by greed, I’d see this person as a center of influence and would want to follow in spite of unappealing content. But the Tweet stream was all either spammy-sounding bizop stuff or long lists of people to follow. I didn’t see anything that added value to me (and I wondered if the high number of following/followers had something to do with a robot scheme). As they say in Twitterese, “Fail.”

The next person tweets in German. I know a tiny bit of German and could take the significant time to puzzle out the tweets, but it doesn’t seem worth the effort. Let people who really speak and understand German fluently follow this person.

Third, another Internet marketer but one who intersperses call-to-action tweets with glimpses of the real human being…who engages in dialogue with others that has universal application…who shares highlights from conferences using hashtags to make them easy to follow–someone, in short, who adds value through Twitter. And by coincidence, this person also has about 14,000 followers, and probably a lot more legitimacy to them than the first person I checked out.

Yes this one I followed. I would have followed back even if only 100 were following this person.

As for those whose profile I didn’t happen to click on…they can get my attention with an @ message or DM, and I’ll take a look. If I like what I see, I’ll happily follow.