Ten reasons to not follow back

Every social media ninja and social networking jedi says the same thing, "Follow Back!" I disagree. Here are ten reasons why:

1. First, just because everyone else is doing it doesn't mean you should. If Johnny jumped... well, you get the point.
2. Second, it is okay to follow back, just do not do so blindly. Read their profile and last 3 tweets to see if you have anything in common.
3. Just because someone is following you doesn't mean you have the same interests. 
4. There are people out there who follow-unfollow just to gain followers -- so you could end up following people who actually aren't following you back.
5. You can't legitimately interact with your audience if your timelines and feeds are flooded with thousands of new posts every minute.
6. Social network influence algorithms like Klout's take your ratio of follows to followers into account when calculating your score -- having more followers than people you follow will improve your score.
7. Most social media gurus follow a lot less people than they have followers -- so they're not even following their own advice.
8. The only way to know if someone is worth following is by seeing the number of followers they have (the most interesting people have the most followers), so if we all followed back how would we know who to follow to begin with?
9. If everyone everywhere followed everyone back what would be the point? The greatest thing about social media is being able to create niche social networks with those of similar interests.
10. And lastly, by not following back, you're doing your part to put an end to this endless cycle. We have to start somewhere.

Can you think of any other good reasons not to follow back (I struggled with the last 2 if you couldn't tell)? If so, add them to the comments below: