February 6th, 2010
I’ve been using Twitter since April/2007. And since joining, I’ve had some simple rules about which Twitter accounts I would choose to follow:
1.) If I had an interest in the person/company/organization using the Twitter account, I’d follow it. No expectations here that the newly-followed account would follow me back. But it’s always been appreciated when that’d happen.
2.) If an account chose to follow me first, and that account was representing a person/company/organization I hadn’t heard of before, I’d usually follow it back unless it was engaging in obvious spam-like behavior.
And that lead me to where I was just a few hours ago. I was following well over 900 accounts, and it was too much. Sure, I had created a special list using TweetDeck to keep track of the accounts that I really cared about. But that list represented a fraction of the total amount of accounts I had chosen to follow. And that’s just silly. Why bother to follow an account and then never actually see that account’s Twitter posts? So, I’ve spent the last couple hours clearing out my Twitter account. I’m now following a more manageable 444 accounts, and I’ve removed that special list from my TweetDeck.
I’ll admit. There was something slightly saddening in hitting the unfollow button a few hundred times. But it’s OK, Twitterverse. It’s not you. It’s me. I’ve changed, and I just need a little space. You see, back in 2007, you were populated by bleeding-edge types who were just interested in trying out the web’s latest attempt at social-networking nirvana. Over time, you became more popular. By 2009, you had become the watchword of the buzzerati. Suddenly, you were a part of corporate marketing plans. And seemingly, overnight, you gave rise to the Social Media Guru, an odd breed of creature who didn’t really exist the year before. But once introduced, the Social Media Guru took hold like a plague of hungry mice ravaging the countryside. And it just wasn’t as much fun anymore to follow back those new accounts that had, for whatever reason, found me first. Regardless, I’m still a fan of what you do, and I’m not going anywhere. I’m just going to be a little more picky about which accounts I choose to follow from here on.
In all seriousness, I found it interesting to see just how many accounts I was following that hadn’t been updated in months and sometimes years. Makes me wonder if those statistics you hear about how something like five percent of all of Twitter’s users are responsible for eighty percent of the site’s activity. Also, I should point out that the follow/follow-back game I had been playing probably did a lot to boost the total number of accounts that were following me. Right now, I’ve got 1,085 followers. Before I began my unfollow run, I had 1,095 followers. As more of those accounts I’ve unfollowed realize what I’ve done, they’re likely to respond in kind. I’m sure that my overall number of followers will easily drop by a few hundred before the weekend’s up. It’s too bad. I’ve liked having over a thousand followers. But it’s likely that most of those followers were pulling the same TweetDeck scheme as me. Yeah, they might’ve been following me, but they weren’t really following me. Now I’ll be able to focus on the quality tweets (qualitweets?) or as I like to call them, the Glengerry tweets. Hmmm… Hope that doesn’t make me sound too much like a Social Media Guru. Anyway, if you’re not already, feel free to follow me on Twitter. I might even follow you back.
February 6th, 2010 at 4:37 am
It’s tough following a lot of folks. There are so much great tweeps out there and it’s difficult to chat with them all. But then there’s the whole concept of ambient awareness and just when I think only a handful are listening, I’ll tweet something and get a response from someone I haven’t really communicated with either ever or in a long while. It’s certainly not the close relationship I have with some tweeps, but I see those kinds of random interactions as small gifts. You never know who’s listening.
February 7th, 2010 at 10:56 pm
I’ll echo what Jesse was saying on hearing back from people I rarely talk to and being surprised they are even seeing what I write. That’s pretty cool. I will agree with you though, that it is impossible to see much of what 1k+ people are saying.
So, I create filters to manage that, but then I miss out on what many people that I am following are saying. I try to mitigate that by having special lists I read everything on and then scan the full list periodically, but it is hard to catch all the interesting bits from the full list. I’m sure you made the right move for you. I’m going to try to plug along a bit longer the way I’m going, but I might have to cull my list a bit eventually as well.
February 8th, 2010 at 12:17 am
[...] today’s Super Bowl game. I was, however, able to keep up with most of the action thanks to my recently downsized Twitter account. And during the game’s halftime show, I noticed quite a bit of antagonism [...]