Do You Follow Back Bloggers Who Follow You?

Today, I thought we could talk about what you do when another blogger follows you. Do you follow back automatically, or are you more selective?

I’ve never been one to automatically follow back. A lot of sites that follow me are clearly spammy or not something that interests me at all, but aside from that, I usually go take a peek and see if their content looks like what I’d be interested in reading regularly.

I only follow blogs that I’m genuinely interested in reading. I do all my blog reading in the Reader, and I get pretty easily overwhelmed, so I don’t like to have my feed cluttered with a lot of blogs I’m not reading very often.

Since mental health is my niche, I’ll follow back pretty much any mental health bloggers, although sometimes a new blog will follow me and I won’t notice it in the sea of spammy new follows. With non-mental health blogs, I’ll sometimes wait a bit before making a decision on following back. If people are genuinely engaging with my blog and I’m interested in what they have to say, then I’ll often like to read their blog even if it falls outside of my usual reading preferences. I’m sometimes a little slow on the uptake with this, though; it takes a while for brain cells to connect in my head.

Then there’s the question of like-for-like. Do you ever like bloggers’ posts that don’t interest you in the slightest simply because they’ve liked yours?

I’m big on genuineness when it comes to blogging. I like community and mutual engagement; that’s what makes blogging a wonderful thing. But the artificialness of the follow-for-follow and like-for-like game isn’t my thing, and I don’t do it. It does seem to be a popular strategy, though.

So, now it’s over to you. Do you follow back? Or automatically like back? Why or why not?