If you’ve used Twitter long enough (and only you can define what “long enough” means), you’ve probably accumulated a hefty number of people and organizations you follow, right?
Unless if you have no life, you’re not staring at the incoming Twitter stream 24×7 but glance at it once in a while, whether 3-4 times a day or several times a week.
How often do you see infrequent twitterers (those without a nuclear follow cost) in your friend stream? Or are some people dominating the stream? Are you following every person you’ve ever met and realizing some of their tweets are worthless to you? Are you seeking more Twitter messages that you can retweet but noticing a large percentage of your incoming stream is retweet-less?
I can go on but I’ll assume you grasp my point that the multi-month twitterer has probably gathered a long(er) list of friends, colleagues, and online strangers that are collectively part of the following list. Am I close?
This shouldn’t be an avenue for everyone, but if you’d like an easy way to increase your Twitter productivity (which would ricochet as increasing your online productivity), unfollow those blokes.
Seth Simonds unfollowed 45,000 people on May 17 and his tweeting frequency quickly decreased.
Same with me. I unfollowed 7,000 Twitter users three months ago and my time management charts went up:
How frequent I tweet
You can see more of my Twitter statistics here.
Because I’m following less people–and following more keyword-specific searches–I am focused less on reading what individual people are writing, distracted less by nuclear twitterers, and participating in larger discussions about big picture issues. I’m also following some strategically-picked people who tend to retweet a lot–and therefore provide the value of many people in one.
Unfollowing is not a solution for everyone but it may be for you. Only you will know.
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Ari Herzog is an online media strategist and Newburyport City Councilor-Elect.
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{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
In my opinion, if people didn’t use the stupid auto-follow software that goes out and just clogs up their Twitter time line with mostly junk, they wouldn’t have to be un-following tens of thousands of people.
Stick to following people manually and everything remains relatively easy to manage with a desktop utility. I can’t imagine, nor do I even want, 7,000 followers. 45,000 followers? Just shoot me.
I wonder if the people who use auto-follow software to amass thousands and thousands of followers ( most of whom don’t give a rat’s ass about what or who you are) would just sign up to be on 7,000 or 45,000 email lists? I seriously doubt it. So why use auto-follow software that just begs for spam?
You don’t want 7,000 followers—or to follow 7,000?
I’ll answer that question for myself — no I wouldn’t want 7,000 followers if most of them are junk accounts. Of course nobody can control every follower but I think your followers list says something about you. And if it’s obvious you’re using an auto-follow service to amass unnaturally high follower #s, what it says ain’t good.
Hey Ari,
My use of Twitter changed a bit but my interaction level went way up. I simply use multiple platforms to keep in touch with many of the people I met during the high use times.
Frenetic email use is the next to go. =)
To those talking about using scripts to follow to get many followers: There’s a difference between autofollow and using an aggressive churn system like Hummingbird increase follower count. The first will keep the people who follow you, the other tends to grab spammers and keep them through reciprocity. It’s been 2+ months since I dropped 45k and I’m down to about 32k now. Click-through’s are higher, nobody calls me a snob, and the people I DO follow know that I’m interested in them.
Want to be authentic? Don’t pretend like you can read the streams of thousands of people at the same time…or that you’re even interested in doing so.
New from Seth Simonds: On Mentorship & Memory
Ari, I mostly don’t follow anyone who’s nuclear.
The FollowCost of someone is one element: nuclear Twitterers have a huge output of Tweets per day. But there’s another: most nuclear folks are using Twitter either as a broadcasting system for self promotion (Guy Kawasaki) or using Twitter as a back-and-forth chat stream.
The promotional people can become tiresome depending on what they’re promoting and how repetitive they are. But the Twitter chat folks actually require even more attention, because their chatting with people I don’t follow is typically time consuming to process.
Most people don’t write self contained Tweets when using Twitter as a chat stream, and so anyone tuning into random comments during the day has to do a lot of click to comprehend what’s being discussed. And then the value may be more for the chatters than for any bystanders tuning into the stream.
When you unfollowed the masses, I thought about unfollowing suit. Instead, I’ve been culling out the high volume Tweople and getting more militant about removing a constant chatter from my stream.
New from Gib: 5 Reasons Why Twitter Isn’t Lame and Isn’t Only Stalkers and Marketers
Great points… Unfortunately, I have found that you have to be very selective on who you follow… If I follow too many people it becomes stressful to use twitter and removes the value I find in it.