When someone follows you on Twitter, do you send them a thank you email? I am trying to access a best practice discussion here. The information available from social media experts range from one extreme to another.

Yes i always mail a thank you mail to all my followers who is following me. However, i dont do it manually. I use tweetlater to do it for me. They send custom message to those who are following, autofollow them and auto unfollow those people who unfollow me. Its very easy to setup and very effective but the service is a kinda slow for standard member and its not instant.

Thanks for the info. I have done this manually by using information posted by each user and it sure was time consuming.

I tried to start a tweetlater account. What is a bit.ly login and a bit.ly ID?

bit.ly is a url shortening service which provides you with analytics. Cool.

I went there and I am not sure how it works?

Just paste the url you want to shorten. Then it will give you a url code. Bit.ly is very useful for Twitter where one only has space for 140 characters.

You will find that sending every one who follows you a Thank You message is a bad idea. Just imagine if everyone you followed did this? The general consensus is that this is a bad idea. It's not like someone has signed up to your website and you're sending them an automated welcome message. This is Twitter. It's more personal, It's a social network. Saying "Thanks, checkout my website" or "Thanks, I'm a so and so guru" is poor form and will quickly get you unfollowed.

As for auto-following people who follow you, what's the point? You may not have any interest in what they have to say and might just be following you in the hopes that you reciprocate rather than having a genuine interest in what you have to say.

Twitter is great for networking: make new contacts and share ideas. It's also a powerful marketing tool, but the automated 'Thank you' message is not how to go about it.

Thanks Socialbug for your comment. I actually used to send personalized thank you follow direct messages and it was very time consuming and I dont think it did anything.

Thanks InsightsDigital! I love to get personal with my followers but when you 100-200 new followers in a day, you cannot make enough time to write individual thank-you emails.