I saw a tweet from @RohitBhargava this afternoon that gave me pause:

Rohit’s definitely on the money in that often the people who offer the most value on Twitter are the ones who actually interact, engage and respond. I love getting replies from followers and discovering new people that way.

But I don’t think I want to automate any sort of follow-back.  I’m actually not in favor of automating much of anything on Twitter, but I’m especially wary of trying to auto follow-back those who reply to me, because unfortunately, reply spam is quickly becoming the hottest form of spam on Twitter.

I’ve been seeing too many unsolicited “click my junk” replies. Sometimes these can be cleverly disguised to look like they’re tweets that were genuinely intended for me until I click over to the sender’s Twitter page to see an entire stream of identical messages aimed at different users. Check out @ShapiroHealth:

At least with reply spam it’s pretty easy to view the user’s page and see pretty quickly whether they’re worth your time or not (unlike spam direct messages). @ShapiroHealth is clearly not, but this account has more than 800 followers! I’m sure that most are due to auto-follows, because honestly, what value does this account provide?

Auto-following just allows more opportunity for spammers to game the system. I understand the reasons why many people employ an auto-follow strategy and follow-back anyone who follows them, but it’s not what works for me. Like Rohit, I’d love to be sure I’m following back all the people who are reaching out to me and interacting through replies. But I think I’ll continue to make my own decisions instead of automating follow-backs to @ replies and giving the spammers an easy target.

What are your thoughts? Would you use an auto follow-back service for @ replies? Have you noticed more reply spam? Do you ignore it, block it, respond? Let me know in the comments.