So you want to increase your following? Great! There are a lot of tools out there that can build you a following quickly, but as business professionals we are more concerned about the quality of our followers, as opposed to the quantity.

Many of these “follow back” or “bulk follow” services can help you win a popularity contest, however, they won’t provide followers from a targeted demographic. In fact, following masses of people makes Twitter very cluttered and hard to use.

At the same time, Twitter has a give-and-take mentality. To gain followers, you must follow people (unless you’re Ashton Kutcher). If somebody follows you and you don’t reciprocate they will likely unfollow you. It is very time consuming to go through all your followers one... at... a... time... to follow them back.

The Tools:
There are a couple free tools that can help you out with each of these dilemmas. To acquire targeted followers, I recommend Twollow. Twollow will auto-follow individuals who use keywords or hashtags. The free service will auto follow up to 15 people per keyword (there is a 5 keyword limit on the free version) every 8 hours. The premium service, which is very affordable, will auto add every hour with a 20 keyword limit.

Other services, like Monitter, TweetLater, and TweetGrid can find you quality individuals as well. Check out the Hashtag post to learn more about them.

Reciprocation is very difficult to do manually. This can easily be automated by Twitter Karma and InRev TwitIn. Both of these services give you a bulk reciprocation (follow back those who follow you) feature to easily manage your Twitter account. Also, you can mass unfollow those who are not following you back. Yes, the “I won’t follow you if you don’t follow me” mentality does seem rather petty, but it's the game we have to play. Both these tools can keep your masses happy.

Please comment with your targeted automation and reciprocation strategies and tools!