Who would you unfollow?
Yesterday, Shama Kabani wrote a post detailing why she unfollowed everyone on Twitter. She makes some good points. Twitter is a huge metropolis instead of a small cozy town. There are a lot of spam bots. There are more mean-hearted people – statistically, that happens when numbers of people increase in general. Shama mentions that she missed being able to see updates from the people she was seeing replies from. So she cut everyone.
The Chopped Liver Syndrome
Here’s the problem for me with this slash and burn strategy. If you cut everyone, then start adding people back slowly but surely (she was up to 44 people she was following when I looked after I read her post), how many people that thought they had a legitimate connection with you are being left wondering why they haven’t been added back yet? How many are left wondering if they’ll ever be added back? What if you’ve talked to that person, but don’t add them back after a post like that? Will they think you were disingenuous when you responded to them? What if you leave off a person you had formed an online friendship with? How many people will find that they are actually feeling quite hurt?
How many will feel like they are chopped liver?
Twitter is what you put into it
A lot of people who come into a chat like Blogchat for the first time say, “Man, this goes so fast. I can’t catch everything!” I always say, “You can’t catch everything. It’s impossible. Catch what you can. Interact as much as you can. Help people who have question marks at the end of their tweets if you can.
For all of the people who say that they are following too many people, I would say the same thing. Will you be able to catch everything everyone says? No. Will you even be able to respond to every @ that you receive? Probably not. But I think we are missing a very simple element in the world of Social Media – being active. Doing things that are not automated for us.
If you genuinely want to stay in touch with someone and see what they are saying, use your time on Twitter to go to their profile, pick something to respond to, and then respond. Let them know you stopped by, even though they didn’t mention you. Go out to the people you want to interact with. Don’t wait for Twitter to deliver you their updates. It won’t happen.
Another option – make lists. I’m following over 1,000 people right now. Out of all of those people, there are quite a few whom I consider friends. People I genuinely care about. No matter how many people I follow, there will always be this ever-growing core of people who I will stay in touch with no matter what. How will I do that? I’ll make lists, as I’ve already started to do, so I can skim in on some of my favorite people. I’ll click to peoples’ profiles when I can. Or if I can’t even find the time to do that, I’ll just say, “Hey, where is so and so? Haven’t talked to you in awhile!” It’s all part of being human. It can be done.
Oh, I have too many friends. You all have to go.
For me, the relationships I’m forging in Social Media are real. I am not rounding up masses of people so that I can sell my beautiful set of cutlery. I’m here to meet people, to network with people. I take that seriously. The people I follow – I follow them all for a reason. And guess what? I’m still following over 1,000 people.
When you are in college, which is another environment where networking and friendships are really important, do you say, “Oh, wait, I’m never going to be able to stay in touch with all of you. You’re all going to have to go”? When you go to a family reunion and all of your cousins, second cousins, aunts half-removed and twice boiled over, and the rest of the clan are there, do you say, “Oh, this is just…this is too many people to keep track of. I’m going to leave the family?”
I hope not.
To me, unfollowing everyone on Twitter is the same line of thinking. I don’t get it. I know that Shama is a brilliant woman, so I’m not trying to fight or lambaste. It just for me is the polar opposite of what I am about here, so I am curious to see where you fit.
Who would you unfollow? How do you keep track of those you do follow? Share your thoughts.
Image by Lars Sundstrom. http://www.sxc.hu/profile/sundstrom
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I think if you are selective about who you add at first, this becomes less of a problem later. There are people I follow who I know will never follow me back. Celebs, papers, etc. There are people I follow that I hope will follow me back, because we have common interests. These are the bulk of my twitter friends. And there are people who follow me that I don’t have an interest in following back, and there is no obligation. I will say this, though. If I make a genuine attempt to interact with you on multiple occasions, and you never respond or interact back, chances are, I will unfollow. Twitter is about engaging, and I think that is lost on some. Thanks for making me think…as usual!
Hi Jen,
I agree. Somehow I was lucky enough to fall into the strategy of not auto-following when I first got started. I always took a look at the person’s profile, determined if they were human or bot, and looked at other minor details like that. Now I feel confident that the people I am following are all good people that can help me enrich my experience. Sometimes people fall in and out of your everyday vision, but they’re still there, and they could pop back in at any time. Why lose them?
Good post about relationships, Margie. And Jen added some good ones too. From time to time I feel overwhelmed by all the feed on the Big 3, & I have to make adjustments. I unfollow or hide people as a last resort, usually because they’re hogging the feed or posting something that I find offensive. I use lists quite a bit to filter out a lot of stuff. Like Jen, if someone can’t take the time to respond to a tweet, I will usually unfollow them. I realize there are those who have thousands of followers, along with a busy scedule, so it would be unrealistic to expect either that they follow me or respond to my occasional tweets to them. What I most appreciate about Twitter is that I’ve connected with some really nice people who go out of their way to help or promote others. Have a great weekend, Margie!
Hi Karen. I agree. It can definitely get to feel overwhelming. That’s why it’s really important to determine what you want out of Twitter as soon as you can. One of my top priorities is to preserve any relationships I make, so that’s where I come from.
Have a great weekend yourself 🙂
Hey Margie,
I agree with you!
This is brutal, and feels like a very selfish-projecting approach.
Granted, people follow (or not) for their own reasons, but this approach says so much “I’ll cut you off to make my life easier” that I really can’t see anything good about it.
And you know what? you are right that there are plenty of alternative solutions:
– Lists. Absolutely! A good hand-picked list is a fantastic way to focus on the people you most want to keep in touch with. And it sends them a great message too.
– Tweepi.com. This website will help you sort out the bots from the real people in no time, with plenty of stats that make it easy to see who is active, who is a broadcaster versus a connector etc…
– Formulists.com. With Formulists custom filters, you can curate automated lists of people who have interacted with you, say 3 times in the last month… those you have RT’d or who have RT’d you etc… And by elimination, all the accounts that just sit there on your following that don’t make it through this filter, can be ousted: you don’t really like their content, you don’t really interact with them
A little bit of this every week helps keep your following numbers both manageable, and focused on the people you are really interested in following and communicating with.
Great post Margie!
@tommoradpour
As I said on Twitter, your comment outdoes my post. Thank you very much for adding that extra value!
Tom –
You mention some good tools, but I find it funny that what you call selfish and brutal was actually the opposite for me.
You mentioned: “And by elimination, all the accounts that just sit there on your following that don’t make it through this filter, can be ousted: you don’t really like their content, you don’t really interact with them.” If I don’t like the content, why should I keep following? So, the person doesn’t feel bad? That felt very dishonest to me.
At the end of the day, social media is about finding what works for you. I am glad that you’ve found some tools that work for you. When I was following 580 people, lists worked for me too. At 16k, it was a joke.
I’d be curious to see if/when you hit such a number, if your view remains the same.
Hi Shama,
Thanks for following up with this post. I see your point.
Question: where you are an author, is it unreasonable to have thousands of followers? I’ve read your book and liked it. I am sure others would like to connect with you via Twitter, in the honest and zen like way you spoke about. 🙂
Yet, as a former broadcaster, I understand the dilemma of being connected with, yet disconnected from your “followers”. Maybe it’s not possible to have a following as an author and still avoid becomming a “broadcaster” rather than a connector.
A thought: I have 2 twitter accounts: One is public (this one) which I use to try to connect and share with people I don’t know, yet who have similar interests. The other is private, and is for RL friends and people I have built some connection to on Twitter. Might something like that work for you too?
Wishing you all the best, in any case.
That’s an interesting conundrum that I think authors are facing these days. Suddenly, you can talk to an author as you are reading their book. In some ways, I think that can be super cool. However, it can also get extremely overwhelming, as Shama points out. Tough to balance that. Er I’d imagine 🙂
Hi DL –
Good question!
I do see myself as a connector – VERY much so. In fact, it was because of that that I am being choosy of who I follow. What point in “pretending” to follow someone but then just focusing on a mini list of people I truly follow? That felt dishonest to me. I also interact with anyone who @’s me. I have surprised many readers of my book that way when they tweet about it. I still pick up my own phone, and answer comments and emails…
– Shama
Also, a tool like untweeps.com works to identify dead accounts and remove them. I use this along with lists and never have an issue. I love my relationships online (even have a blog post coming up on that).
Great post Margie
Thanks, Marsha! I’ll be sure to look out for that! 🙂
Margie,
I agree with your stance. I’ve seen a few difference strategies.
1. Follow no one and put everyone they are interested in conversing with on lists based on the categories of their tweets.
2. Follow every account that follows them and talk to (some of the) people who talk to them. For some, it’s understandable not to be able to reach all of the people.
3. Follow only real people that they’ve had real conversations with.
Like you, I began on Twitter with a policy of not following everyone that followed me. Whenever I got a new follower that I hadn’t previously spoken to or RT’d via someone else’s RT, I tried speaking to them. In some cases the conversations were like a bad blind date: awkward and you just wanted to get out of there. I also saw accounts following me that were locked but never spoke to me. It all just became too much. I also discovered quickly the hurt feelings that develop when someone whom you’ve been in great conversations with unfollows you. You’re left there wondering just what it was that you said that made them decide to cut off the relationship.
What I learned, though, is that it’s not always what you say but what someone else says about you. For that reason, I became very selective about who I follow. I speak to just about everyone who speaks to me. I do only follow real people who follow me, though. Celebrities, brands, etc… that don’t follow me aren’t the people I want showing up in my feed. These are the accounts that don’t really want to have a conversation with me. They just want my support. My process evolved out of a desire to prevent hurt feelings for both parties. Isn’t it uncomfortable when you realize you replied or RT’d someone who intentionally unfollowed you? If someone new follows me, I give them a few days of my tweets showing up in their timeline. If they’re still hanging around and their tweets are interesting to me, I follow them back. When I get spare time, I go through and block the spammers to prevent an inflated follower count. This process takes the most time, but it is the one that has garnered the best regret-free, drama-free, timeline that I look forward to scrolling through every day.
I apply the same idea for myself when I find an account I’d like to follow. I follow for a bit and speak to them. If they don’t reply (and it’s not a case of stepping away from the computer for X number of hours), I assume they don’t want my business and I unfollow. If they autofollow me but still never speak to me when I speak to them, I unfollow, as well.
Twitter takes time, and I appreciate everyone that reads my tweets and has conversations with me because I do the same. It’s the reason I know what reaches my community.
Wow, what an amazing response. Thank you so much for taking the time to do that!
I agree, there can be a lot of drama. I used to agonize over people unfollowing me when I first got started but now – for some reason I just figure it’s up to them. I’ve noticed some people follow, unfollow, then follow again. There are a lot of games you can play that way. I just do the best I can to keep track of people I care about – if they unfollow me I do get upset!
Thanks again!
Hi Margie –
Thanks for your thoughtful post. I have to say I am surprised to see such feedback on what I consider to be a very personal decision. = )
I know that lists work for some people, but I didn’t see the point in following 16k, and then only focusing on 30 or 40 using a list? I found that to be a fake projection of what was truly going on. So, you think I am following you…but, then I’m really not? That’s not honest for me.
Also, my goal wasn’t to make people I unfollowed feel like “chopped liver”- as you state. Nor was it was it to say “I have too many friends, you must go.” It was exactly the opposite. I didn’t feel that I was truly respecting those I was “following.” And, I find the whole “you follow me, I’ll follow you back” a little reminiscent of first grade.
I want people who follow me to do so because I provide value. And, I want to follow them because they add value to my life.
At the end of the day, to thine ownself be true. And, that’s exactly what I feel I did.
Hi Shama,
Thank you so much for stopping by. Your post got my attention because this issue seems to be a perpetual undercurrent of debate in the world of Twitter. A little while ago, Mitch Joel and Mark Schaeffer kind of debated via their blogs, and I brought both of their viewpoints here.
I agree, the way that everyone runs their Social Media presence has to be up to them.
I also probably cannot imagine what it’s like to try to follow 16,000 people, so I may end up eating all of these words. Right now, I’m not too worried about that number 🙂
For me, there are people I follow, people I chat with on occasion, and then people I consider true friends. It makes sense to me to separate out the friends, because that extends beyond just the realm of Twitter. However, they became true friends because at one point we decided to follow each other to make it easier to interact.
I find it awkward sometimes when you’ve been talking to someone back and forth and then they say, ‘Hey, why aren’t you following me? Is it something I said?”
That being said, I don’t follow back everyone either. I pick everyone I follow individually. That is working for me for now.
Thanks again for stopping by!
Margie thank you for the interesting piece. I think the dynamics of following or unfollowing are pretty interesting. One part of it all, and it seems to be unspoken often, is that if a person has say 15,000 followers, and then suddenly unfollows all but a few, that person will suddenly have the “look” of a celeb. New followers will be enticed by the apparent ability that person has to have thousands of followers without following many. I can definitely think of a number of examples of twitter profiles where people have done that.
I personally have gone up and down and round and round about my own twitter strategy, and at times just followed back everyone that looked half way real, and at times followed back a little more carefully. In the end, you do end up with some junk in your twitter feed that makes it a little harder to catch up with people you like. I guess I am okay with that chaos. If you didn’t like that chaos, maybe you would be on Facebook.
Then there is the whole dynamics of “@” replies. If you are following thousands of people and getting a ton “@” replies then by the time you reply to all of them, your whole twitter feed looks like @ replies. By the same token, I don’t follow feeds that appear to have NO “@” replies in them!! I admire Scott’s ability to keep up with his “@” replies (I’m referring to @unmarketing) – He seems to be a position where that happens, but it doesn’t take much either. A few thousand followers maybe.
And then there are the people you are following where you look at their profile and they claim to love the exact same things as you yet will never follow.
Thanks for the food for thought Margie.
See, I would prefer my feed look like @ replies. I mean, sometimes I want to promote a blog post or someone else’s blog post (not technically a reply), but to me the whole point of Twitter is the @. It’s talking to people. When I look at someone’s profile to see if I want to follow them, the number of times I see them talking to instead of at people influences my decision.
Thank you very much for your great comment. I appreciate it!
Yes. All good posts! Thanks for opeoing this dialog
Yikes! Throwing the baby out with the bathwater as this Shama lady did is just plain bad karma! And it’s so unnecessary.
I follow anyone kind enough to follow me back, because I’m flattered. If some of them are spambots, well, that’s why my “All Friends” column on Tweetdeck is pushed off to one side, and eventually I’ll take Marsha’s advice and unfollow a few of the most obvious spambots, of course.
Instead of worrying over having too many people to keep up with, though, I follow people by interest, because they’re tweeting about things I find interesting: in my case, #custserv (customer service), leadership, and social media. And after I’ve built a relationship with someone, if they don’t dwell on these Tweetdeck columns, I’ll stick them in “Real Friends” or “Biz Gurus,” where I can easily stay in touch with them.
I’ve had a life-long aversion to arrogance, and I’m repulsed when I see a “celebrity” (or self-styled “celebrity”) who follows only a few people and has a large following themselves. Perhaps I’m judgmental, but they strike me as insecure and highly unattractive.
Just my take on this controversial topic. Thanks, Margie, for hosting this party!
Hi Ted,
I am not sure that it’s bad karma per se, and I want to stray away from making this argument just about what her decision was.
Moreso, I think it’s a good opportunity to discover what everyone else thinks about it 🙂
I have never auto-followed…I think there are just too many spam bots out there, and I don’t like to chance it. That is my own particular decision regarding this matter.
I agree with you about people who may have thousands of followers but only follow 47. I wonder what they are getting out of the experience. Then again, maybe their desire is to be more a broadcasting Twitter user rather than one who really interacts. My only concern about that is that I think it can really set up new people for some big disappointments and bad examples.
Thanks again for stopping by! 🙂
The @ is where it’s @ and I choose to follow that 🙂 – the rest is to be “un” derstood …
Now back to my snowglobes 🙂
Following back everyone who follows you is extreme. The extreme cure appears to be (in Shama’s view) unfollowing EVERYbody. Let me make claim for the middle ground.
I don’t follow everyone who follows me on Twitter. (Also don’t accept every friend/connect request on other social media, either.) Before I follow back, I look people over. Do they have a bio? What do they tweet about? What are their following/follower numbers? I’m not a snob about it (at least I hope not), and I don’t have hard and fast rules, I just want to get a feel for whether someone’s Twitter feed will be interesting or useful to me.
My approach to social networking online probably reflects the fact that I grew up in New York City. My late teens coincided with a particularly ugly time for NYC. Young women who befriended everyone who tried to chat them up or followed strangers on the street sometimes ended up on the front page of one of our tabloid papers, dead. While social media is a little safer, it’s very public. I don’t worry about being murdered, but I could be spammed, harassed or be the victim of identity theft.
So who do I not follow:
* No bio, no photo, no link (or it’s your Twitter profile). I have a bio, photo and link, and while I don’t expect everyone to have all three, it’s fair to expect some near-equal exchange of personal information.
* Offensive content. An occasional cuss word in your tweets won’t get you unfollowed, but the follower who dropped the F-bomb in her bio got blocked. There is a difference between a tweet, which may express frustration at a bad day, and your bio, which is supposed to tell me who you ARE. If you tell me you are a F***, I’ll take your word on it and block you. Similarly, tweeps with sexy boudoir photos whose tweets tell me they want me to do things to them which are (a) impossible over an Internet connection and (b) impossible if I am a heterosexual female, get blocked.
* Boring, which includes nothing but self-promotion. I’m being followed by a business association whose tweets all look like: “Are you looking for a widget? Go to John’s House of Widgets on Maple Street….” and then the association’s (not the company’s) URL. Every single tweet–for at least two weeks. I am not following them, and never will unless they radically alter their style.
* Irrelevant, even if it’s not boring or offensive. Like the takeout food service in Oklahoma (I’m still in NYC), the maternity clothing shop, the wig store, the auto dealership (I take subways and buses; I don’t know how to drive). I don’t block them, but I don’t follow them.
* People I don’t know yet. There are several people following me whom I haven’t made up my mind about. Every so often I review the list and reconsider. Same goes for people on lists I follow (like UsGuys) and chats I participate in (BlogChat, TweetDiner, NPTalk). If I see their tweets and they look interesting, I’ll follow directly; otherwise, I continue to see them via other connections.
And don’t even get me started about my “Please Unfollow” list….
excellent points all the way around, Karen. I can’t believe someone would use a swear word in their bio. I’m certainly not averse to swearing but I refrain online because I don’t think people should think of me as a sailor. That’s not what I’m going for (no offense at all to sailors, of course).
Thank you for your very thoughtful comment. I’m hanging in the middle with you 🙂
I use http://followerfilter.com/ for Searching User- Tweet RT and Favorite listing and deletion – Unfollower finding an deletion. Even the site is new, it works well!
Site also allows you to see any twitter user’s (included yours) unfollowers, followers and followings without login.
Of course it’s free and unlimited!