I thought spammers were people who spam, so if you can't spam, how can someone be a spammer?

People should be free to decide whom they want to follow or not, and it's really nobody else's concern.

My general policy is to have a look at recent tweets from new followers and decide whether to follow back along the lines of your post. However, volume of tweets is a big one for me - even if someone is interesting it is difficult to bring myself to follow them if they will end up bombarding my timeline.

I think early on it was the norm to follow-back everyone who followed you. But that paradigm has clearly changed.

Are you going follow-back that spam follower? No, so that 1 to 1 relationship is gone.

Do you expect a celebrity to follow me back? Is Lance Armstrong going to follow? No.

So you follow people that interest you and some of them will follow you back because you interest them. Don't take the lack of following or stops following you personally.

If you want to be followed, make sure you put up a picture, tell us about yourself (in less than 140 characters) and don't protect your tweets.

I don't automatically follow everyone who follows me nor do I expect everyone I follow to do the same. I try to be as interactive as I can with those who do @me but I have followers who have NEVER tried to engage me and continue to stay on the sidelines.

I have purposely NOT followed the main twitter 'stars' just because many do and I figure if they say something relevant I will get the info. in a RT and I don't have to bother with all the noise in my tweet stream.

So you follow people that interest you and some of them will follow you back because you interest them. Don't take the lack of following or stops following you personally.

I don't usually reciprocally follow others just for the sake of doing so. While I might be happy that a person follows my tweets, unless I ask them directly, it can be very hard, and still entirely speculative, to figure out why they find me or my tweets interesting (excluding the spammers, of course).

In my earliest days of tweeting, I tended to follow everyone who followed me. That quickly became overwhelming, so I became more selective.

I don't take it personally when someone I follow does not follow me in return. On the other hand, I'll admit I sometimes feel flattered and honored when I someone I consider a really high-powered person follows me. Even then, I don't let my head get too big because, again, without asking them directly, I can guess why they found my tweets interesting, but I still won't be certain.

Followers come and followers go. I think that's part of the nature of micro-blogging.

If I remember that I'm using Twitter as a networking and communication tool, I'll avoid considering it as some high school-esque popularity contest, and I'll gain more benefits from tweeting.

But if it's obvious they're spamming or just using Twitter to push a product then I block them (fine line there - sometimes I think people can 'spam' unintentionally, when really they just don't get it, and haven't taken the time to figure it out). I've never really understood the value in using Twitter for spam. For the effort the person on the other end has to put into it, I can't imagine there'd be much return. But like email spam there must be enough suckers out there to make it worth their while.

I'd like to think those who do follow me genuinely care about what I might have to say, but my "Twitter rank" doesn't mean a lot to me. For me, Twitter is simply one of several tools I use to enhance my online experience.