If the purpose is to engage with the public directly, then some sort of auto-follow may be appropriate (but I think some filtering needs to be applied to weed out spammers – that may require a script or 3rd party service). However, any accounts that are sector/audience specific I think there is justification to be picky who the account follows. Either way the resources required should not be great.

Really grateful you covered the Twitter strategy here in so much detail. I’m working my way through all the feedback over the next few weeks, and yours (and Seb’s) aren’t the only voices questioning the auto-follow approach.

I’m coming around to your way of thinking – but at the end of the day it’s for each organisation to choose what works for them. Some simply can’t staff up to following back manually – it can be a real drain on time to vet followers and follow the good ones back.

However, I think if it’s clearly explained in the public twitter policy then it should be OK.

In addition to the spam issue the other philosophical point of not auto-following is that – despite some people’s version of ‘twitterquette’ – twitter was designed for asynchronous following, unlike facebook for example (until the pages/fan functionality came along).

I still think that gov accounts should have the disclaimer no endorsement implied (even if, as you say, it won’t be believed – and in fact probably is); the main reason to only follow say those in your industry and sector and probably your staff is that there is the key secondary benefit of actually being able to use twitter effectively to monitor just those users. To auto-follow back would loose that benefit as the signal:noise ratio would become so low as to be ineffective for that.

Anyway thanks again – that was a blog post I was wanting to write, but as I don’t have a blog of my own (partly principle, partly #lazyweb I’ve hijacked yours again