Somebody’s following me...

It took me a while but I finally got there. I just surpassed the 1,000-follower mark on Twitter.

For those of you who don’t know, Twitter is a micro-blogging site that allows users to share status updates, links to stories and even pictures, just as long as they find a way to do in it 140 characters or less.

I don’t remember exactly when I opened my account (@michellemgraff) on Twitter but I know it’s taken me a couple of years to build up this many followers, many of whom are involved in the jewelry industry in some way.

The other week, though, something happened that made me reconsider the value of each follower. I tweeted that I was heading to the much-rain-delayed U.S. Open to, hopefully, seen some tennis. Less than 30 seconds after I tweeted “tennis,” I had a new follower, a New York-based tennis instructor.

It seems this person used some kind of auto-follow function to latch on to anyone on who mentions "tennis," which is not a great social media tactic, says Dan Gordon, the most social media-savvy jeweler I know. “I guess sometimes it can work out, but it’s a creepy feeling to get followed because I said something. It’s, in a sense, kind of a form of spam,” he said.

Creepy, yes, and completely ineffective; I am not interested in ever learning to play tennis and, while I am happy to go see a match live, I have nominal interest in the sport.

My strange tennis follow had me wondering how many other followers I have who have no interest in the jewelry industry. To answer this burning question of the social media age, Gordon directed me to two services, SocialBro and Sprout Social.

I had a little technical difficulty getting started on SocialBro but I found it well worth the wait once I was able to download this tool.

SocialBro really breaks down you Twitter account. It tells you who isn’t following you back, how many of your followers are considered influential (have more people who follow them than they follow) and warns you of potential “spammers” you might be following or who might be following you.

Just one note about the spammers, though: SocialBro classifies spammers are those who follow more people than they have following them. Thumbing through my list of so-called spammers, however, I spotted quite