This is possibly the most useful help you can get with your Twitter account/s. We all know how important immediate feedback is. It's a great motivator, an emotional reward, and a path builder towards future behavior.
Think about it: if you send something out into the ether and don't get anything back within minutes, you tend to feel disappointed. If it takes hours or even days to get a response, it no longer has any real impact. Your action seems to have been little more than waving at nobody in the dark.
Now imagine clicking 'follow' on your favorite sports, movie or singing star, and getting a message back from them: "Wow, thanks for that. I really appreciate you wanting to listen to what I have to say. I'll follow you too, if you don't mind".
You might not be a star of such magnitude yourself, but when someone chooses to follow you, you are a star of sorts; they value your opinion, or your sense of humor, your expertise, whatever it is you have to say. They have programmed you into their personal channel, so reward them for it from the start. Send them an instant response.
"Thank you for following me. I really do appreciate it and I'm going to follow you too."
That's double the impact - a thank you and a follow in return. You are rewarding your follower, enthusing them, making them feel good, establishing the first stages of friendship. They haven't been waving in the dark; they have just shaken your hand.
'But what if I'm out partying all night, or asleep? What if I'm being spied on by my fascist eagle-eyed boss at work, or maybe leading a 30-strong horde raid on Karazhan, or cooking vegan Christmas dinner for my in-laws on a primus stove?'
With TweetingMachine you can send an immediate message to a new follower even if you are halfway up Mount Everest, sailing across the Atlantic in a soap dish, attempting to break the Guinness Book of Records record for setting up single-handedly and toppling the largest number of dominos (3,847,295) or leading a scientific expedition to sample the exotic gases of Uranus.
It's incredibly simple. Just use TweetingMachine to enable your account to do automatic 'return follows' and, if you want, add an appropriate message.
Okay, for the Greta Garbo 'I vant to be alone' types who prefer not to have thousands of followers, you can always delete the ones you don't want later. But for the people who you do want to keep around, the impact of an instant 'thank you and follow' is going to make them feel valued and rewarded, and they will thus think so much more highly of you. As with all worthwhile social interactions, a little consideration and forethought go a long way.
And a special word in the shell-likes of those of you using Twitter as a marketing tool: 'The goodwill is seriously worth its weight in gold.'
TweetingMachine: your social relationship manager.