Comments on: How Unfollowing May Increase Twitter Productivity

By: Joel McLaughlin

Joel McLaughlin — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 20:35:09 +0000

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.

By: Gib

Gib — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 19:25:45 +0000

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

By: Seth Simonds

Seth Simonds — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 13:06:42 +0000

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

By: Mike Mokrzycki

Mike Mokrzycki — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 02:22:31 +0000

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.

By: Ari Herzog

Ari Herzog — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 16:14:42 +0000

You don’t want 7,000 followers—or to follow 7,000?

By: Ed Hudson

Ed Hudson — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 02:06:39 +0000

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?