Do you automatically follow everyone who follows you on Twitter or do manual follow backs?

Image by SeattleClouds.com via Flickr

To auto-follow or not to auto-follow, that is the question.

Ever since I signed up on Twitter, I’ve been using Social Oomph (formerly TweetLater) to automatically follow everyone who follows me. (I also use their “Vet Followers” feature when I remember.*) I still manually follow people who interest me as I find them but this enables me to quickly and easily follow-back anyone who follows me.

Advantages:

Time saver (as your follower count gets higher and higher, manually following people back can be time intensive)
Goodwill (people who follow me have the good faith gesture of me following back almost immediately)

Disadvantages:

I fall prey to a ton of spam bots and unwanted auto-DMs
I often find myself following people who are completely unrelated to my interests

That said, I’ve still found it easier to automatically follow everyone who follows me and then just manually unfollow the spammers, auto-DM jerks, and anyone else who isn’t relevant to my interests once I start to see their tweets in my stream. But I really hate getting spam in my direct messages so I always wonder if it might save time in the end to go back to manual following.

What do you think? Is the time saving feature of auto-following everyone who follows you worth the DM spam and junk accounts?

*= The Vet Followers feature holds new followers in a queue so that you can evaluate whether you want to follow them or not. This is wonderful but the problem with this is that they only hold them for 3 days and then automatically follow if you haven’t answered by then. I wish this time period was longer: logging in every three days is higher maintenance then I’d like.