Downsides of Protecting Your Tweets

If you’re on Twitter, you’ve probably encountered a user who has chosen to protect their updates. If someone chooses this option (“protect your updates” on the Settings tab on Twitter.com), no one can follow them without asking for permission.

While there are many reasons you might choose to block folks from viewing your tweets, if you’re hoping to build a network for business purposes, protecting your updates limits you in a few different ways.

Before I follow someone on Twitter, I check out their profile page (assuming I don’t know them already). I read the bio, and I look at the person’s tweets to see if this is someone who will add value to my stream. From talking to others, this is common behavior.

Value means different things to us all, but for me, I want to make sure someone does more than tweet breakfast items or regurgitate news or make sales pitches. I want to follow a real person – to me, that’s valuable.

When I see this…

I have less information to work with. If all else is equal, I will not send a request to follow. I have nothing to go on, so I err on the side of caution.

Occasionally I can tell that someone is a fellow writer because of the people they are following, but that only happens if I have time to check. Often, I don’t… so I don’t follow. Again, others I spoke with said the same thing.

So, for this reason alone, protecting updates makes it much harder to grow your network, even if you take the time to find people to follow.

Another downside of protecting your updates is that your tweets cannot be retweeted. This means that when you do say something wonderful or share great news, it cannot spread beyond the people who’ve cleared your blocked-hurdle.

Twitter can be a happy accident machine as your words or news spread to new eyes, but by protecting updates, that chance has been killed off. Again, you’ve hurt the chances for your network to grow.

Speaking only for myself, I always assume anything I do online can be public at some point (particularly if I don’t want it to be!), so I try never to tweet anything I wouldn’t be okay with the whole world seeing. Yes, I block pornbots and the like if I notice them, but otherwise… follow away!

I do care very much who I follow, and I choose appropriately. When I run into a protected user, though, I’m blind. Again, most folks I talked with in prepping this post said the same thing: a protected user is unlikely to be followed.

Protecting your updates is a personal choice, and there are many reasons folks do it. Still, if one of your goals on Twitter is to build a network, you’ll be far better served by letting your tweets be visible to one and all.

Do you protect your tweets? And if so… why? Or do you send requests to protected users all the time? I’d love to hear….

Tagged as: Twitter