Are you a follower? Time to lead the purge charge

by

Illustration by Scott Hampson. Borrowed from http://laurelpapworth.com

Last week I noticed something very interesting about my personal twitter account: There is absolutely nothing interesting about my personal twitter account.

I was on auto-follow for a good portion of my early twitterings, and I ended up following a bunch of random people, bots, and businesses that mean about as much to me as  the unemployed mean to Herman Cain.

So here I am following more than 1,000 tweeps, and my eye-rolling rate increases significantly with each visit to twitter.

Time for a major purge.

Up until now I never really made a point to “unfollow” anyone. I guess I felt like “unfollowing” was a bit of a dirty word. Sort of like the infamous act of “unfriending” someone on Facebook. I didn’t want to hurt any feelings. I also worried about hurting my bottom line … my number of twitter followers.

This week I began slowly weeding through the people I follow, and “unfollowing” like a mad woman. I still have a ways to go, but I’ve made progress. This is the criteria by which I am choosing whom to keep:

  1.  We share similar values and interests.
  2. You inspire, entertain or amuse me.
  3.  I know you in real life, and you don’t entirely make me want to throw up in my mouth.
  4. You don’t claim to be a social media or marketing expert who can increase my followers and my income.
  5. You’re not a web cam porn star.

So far I’ve unfollowed about 200 people and I’ve lost about 75 followers. I am not taking it personally. I want my followers to find just as much value in following me, as I want to find value in following them. I would rather have a smaller, more attentive following, then a large following where I’m tweeting into a vacuum. Besides, I am pretty sure a lot of the people I have unfollowed so far are not even people at all as they unfollowed me back almost instantaneously.

Slowly, but surely, I am noticing that my twitter stream is becoming more relevant to my life, and I am more interested in logging in.

And so the purge continues …

What about you? What’s your feeling on following and unfollowing?

Category : Logged On, Twitter
Tags : , , , ,