There's a camp of people who feel that Twitter common courtesy is to follow back everyone that follows you. They especially seem to feel that sense of entitlement when it comes to celebrities at various levels. I am clearly not in that camp.
Here's the thing: let's say a celeb that is followed by 10,000 people follows them all back. Do you really think he reads every tweet? I would expect that would be no. I would expect they'd do what most do: read the @replies to them, maybe peruse a few tweets, but he'll skip reading about what you had for breakfast. Most use a Twitter client that allows them to group so they may not even see your tweets in their feed. They may "follow" you but still read only the folks that they'd read if they didn't follow the courtesy. I know of folks who have/follow 10,000+ who keep a read-only Twitter account for their "favorites." So yeah, they may "follow" you but they don't read your tweets.
What's that? Oh, if they follow you, then you can DM them? Guess what happens when you have 10,000 people DM-ing you? Yeah, you tend not to respond. Maybe it gets read but not any more so than the @replies.
Really there's no point in celebs to follow-back. There's nothing that the fans get from that move in particular, and it can be an onerous task for the celeb to manage (if you use an auto-follow tool then all of a sudden you're following the Brit.ney's and other assorted garbage back. How does that look to your fans if you're following spammers?). I've dealt with some who follow-back and some who don't and I don't see where the former are any more interactive than the latter. Heck, I don't follow everyone back.
Finally, for those who say "But following back is common courtesy! Those who don't follow back don't 'get' Twitter!" I say "then I guess @ev and @biz don't 'get' Twitter."
Twitter Lists
Now, on to lists. People have been trying to figure them out since Twitter introduced them. I'm still figuring it out. I do tend to use/organize lists differently on Twitter web than I use, say, groups in TweetDeck. The ones I've made public are for the benefit of those who follow who are looking to follow certain categories (including myself!). But I'm doing/thought of some interesting things to do with private lists that I thought would be worth sharing:
- Build a "must-reads" list. Thanks to the computer situation around the house (and sometimes, the time I have to check Twitter), I don't always have TweetDeck at my disposal. I only follow about 300 folks but that can be a lot to try to read/catch up on if I've been away for a bunch of hours. With Tweetdeck it's easy, especially if you skim past "conversations." I will freely admit that there are those whose tweets I don't want to miss, especially some who don't tweet so often. So I have built a private "must-read" list that I can go-to during quick check-ins. It's worked great...just trying to settle on the sweet-spot of how many I can put on that list before it becomes burdensome.
- Start an "ungrouped" list. I love Tweetdeck, but one area that is notoriously bad in it is group/following management. They have the whole "new followers" column thingie, but still there are times where I may decide to follow folks from the Twitter interface. When I do that, I always have to remember to go into TweetDeck and search the person so I can add them to a group. Not any more with my "ungrouped" list. I put new follows in there, then pull it up in Tweetdeck to see who I still need to "group." And Tweetdeck does have a nice means to move people to/from lists/groups.
- "Anonymously follow." I don't do this (yet) but I can see where this could be a neat feature of lists. One of the neat things about lists is that you don't need to follow everyone who is on your lists. So you could conceivably add folks to a private list without actually following them and keep up with their tweets without their name showing up in your "following" & yours in their "followers" list.
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