I’m no stranger to changing Twitter strategies.
The last big shift occurred in April 2009 when I opted to automatically follow every person and organization who followed me, creating an identical match of numbers between those who followed me and those I followed. Two weeks later, I explained why I unfollowed everyone on Twitter–over 7,000 accounts–and started fresh.
By May, I shared another strategy to reinvent my primary @ariherzog and dormant @ariwriter accounts and use them differently–but that, too, was a short-lived experiment.
Fast forward to yesterday when I read Jesse Stay’s experiment after he accidentally unfollowed his base of 23,000:
I came here to share something. I came here to learn something from others. The connections we gain from learning from each other are what matter to me. Some times we entertain each other. Some times we teach each other. I’m here to strengthen others’ knowledge and learn from others at the same time, not inflate a number for anyone, especially myself. IMO the whole “numbers thing” should happen naturally. That’s how we engage. That’s how we build real relationships – that’s what true marketing is, or should be about.
This hit me hard. See, while I’ve never tried to artificially inflate my Twitter followers, I recall July 2008 when I was a devoted reader of Darren Rowse’s blog about blogging and I responded here to his request for social media profiles. It shouldn’t matter than 670 other people responded to his call for action; the point is I included my Twitter account in what ultimately became a database for spammers.
When you consider the average new Twitter user gives up in the first month, it’s a fair guess that 25 to 50 percent of my 7,000+ Twitter followers are–were–inactive accounts.
No more. The buck stops here. I’ve changed my Twitter strategy, with a spark from Jesse, and I want to share what I’ve done.
First, @ariherzog is brand new:
First tweet of ariherzog - Click to zoom
Second, @ariwriter is back:
Last tweet of ariwriter - Click to zoom
Third, everything I previously tweeted as @ariherzog is now archived as @ariherzog_old:
Last tweet from ariherzog_old - Click to zoom
I will continue to maintain other Twitter accounts, such as my campaign tweets at @ari4newburyport and intend to resurrect online branding at @brandcustomer — but for @ariherzog, at least, you can see where it stands. I’ve done, essentially, with Kris Colvin’s suggestion, what many of you complained I should have done back in April when I unfollowed you.
I didn’t delete my account then, nor now; I merely changed Twitter names around.
If you want to engage with me on Twitter, you’ll need to (re)follow me at @ariherzog. If you want to follow my blog posts in an RSS-like Twitter feed, follow @ariwriter.
Questions? Feedback? Leave a comment below!
All good things must come to an end. Effective November 14, 2009, @ariherzog_old is now deleted. Whether archived tweets will remain indexed by Google is unknown.
Related posts:
- Show Me the Money or Twitter Will Fail
- How Unfollowing May Increase Twitter Productivity
- Curious Why Twitter Rank is Meaningless?
Comments:
Ari Herzog is an online media strategist and Newburyport City Councilor-Elect.
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Ari,
Sound strategy. Your follows should be intentional. Equally, weeding out spam followers is a positive approach.
Cheers and best of luck on this path.
Todd
New from Todd Jordan: 4th Annual Strange Folk Festival
Indeed. No longer do I need to rely on tools like http://twitspam.org for blocking, when I can manually do it.
what I like about this strategy is not whether it is wrong or right, but that you are willing to try new things and not mind “risking” any status you have in the Twitter/Blogosphere. Good for you.
Too many rigidly stick with what they “know” and don’t see if other things might work.
New from Laurel Papworth: MySpace Music Australia launch
You refer to Twitter lists through sites like http://twitter.grader.com and http://twinfluence.com and such. If I am ranked according to the number of folks who follow me, and if I assume 25% or more are fakes or inactives, then that is a failed rank.
Do it now, and my rank will likely be less but more true.
I was one of those who cried foul when you unfollowed me. I was newer to Twitter than you were, and I didn’t understand what I had done to make you want to stop following me. I understand that you were thinking differently about your Twitter strategy than when you started. And you could still converse with me as wanted.
Today, I see you as continuing to evolve, to try new things, to tip your toes in new waters, to change your tactics, to take new roads, to taste new paths. I applaud you for wanting to try new things and continue to learn.
The question I ask myself is do I want to be a passenger, along for your ride, following you as you are at the wheel, driving the car? Or do I want continue driving my own car and letting our paths cross serendipitously? I don’t know.
I do know that you challenge me with new thoughts, new ideas, new views. Sometimes I don’t agree with you. Sometimes I do.
Yet, that’s where true learning occurs. And that’s a good thing.
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I don’t want you to be a passenger in my car, Jeff, unless you choose that or Fate provides that. I’d prefer you drive your own car.
Good on ya for continuing to experiment and find what works. It will be interesting to see how many of your old followers re-follow you. Until now all of your strategies have been aimed at changing who/how many YOU follow, while those who follow you have been largely unaffected. This puts the onus back on them to decide if they want to follow you again.
I’m still struggling but found that for the past few months I’ve been much less actively adding new people to follow. With the proliferation of bots and inactives I definitely don’t want to do an auto-follow back (as you learned) but I also don’t necessarily have time to manually assess each new follower. There are times I consider starting again from scratch or really going in and weeding out followers but I think that might be more hassle than it’s worth.
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It’s not about people following me. I’ve never cared for that — after that July 2008 Darren comment anyway. I look at folks like actor Kevin Spacey (http://twitter.com/kevinspacey) who constantly replies to people, but he doesn’t follow them. His fans ask questions, he answers. Isn’t that one way to use Twitter?
If I’m following you and you’re not following me (but think you are) and you send me a DM, I can’t reply by DM. Then the conundrum arrives: Do I publicly tweet you saying you’re not following me, referring to this blog post or @ariherzog_old, or do I contact you by email or Skype or such if I have it, or do I ignore the DM and wait for you to @ me? I don’t know, time will tell.
Like you say, it’s about you this time, not me. I already made the decision.
Thanks.
So, I get the idea of having multiple Twitter accounts to serve different purposes. I get the unfollow – I agree that following should be a deliberate effort.
But seriously, WHAT ON EARTH in the purpose of archiving old tweets and re-starting your account, annoying those who would like to follow you but don’t have time to read this post?! (you know I’m only reading it because we had a Twitter conversation about it – social media “strategy” ain’t my thing)
Seriously…please appreciate the fact that, while some of us find your insights interesting and enjoy following your commentary, not all of us are in the social media “industry” and care about strategy.
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If following should be a deliberate effort, as you wrote in the first paragraph, then future following of me on Twitter will be. Isn’t that what we agree is a good thing?
No. I already made the deliberate decision to follow you, and do so every day. I’m the kind of person who unfollows people on a regular basis (for example, when they say something that annoys me or use the #tcot hashtag, ever). I don’t need you making those decisions for me.
New from Jillian C. York: On Faux Nostalgia
I unfollow tweeps, too. I don’t want to make a decision for you; but when you DM’d me before and I couldn’t DM back, how would you have suggested I handle it other than an @ reply? Ignore the DM and let you figure it out?
No, you handled it correctly. I just think you shouldn’t have done it in the first place. You created an extra unnecessary and undesired step in my day.
New from Jillian C. York: On Faux Nostalgia
Fair enough. Though, as Amy indicates in an earlier comment, the step is yours to choose to make, not mine to force you to make.
I guess I don’t quite understand why it matters whether a certain percentage of your *followers* are inactive or bots, Ari.
Unless you’re following them back, DM spam is not an issue and you’re not even seeing their tweets… As long as you’re NOT auto-following, but making a conscious choice about who you want to follow, then your Twitter stream will have undiluted value to you, surely? And I may very well be missing something, but I’ve never seen how third-party “rankings” can help you to connect with interesting others on Twitter…
But I know you’ve thought about your “Twitter strategy” a whole lot more than I have – more than most of us have, I suspect! Can you clarify your reasons for blocking certain followers and going so far as to shuffle accounts around to get rid of them?
Imagine you enjoy driving a car so much but the mileage is higher than you’re comfortable with, that you decide to buy a new car. But rather than go shopping for new models, you buy the same model with zero mileage.
Pick any other analogy. That’s what I’ve done. I have the same model with zero mileage; and the junker is out there now, collecting dust.
It doesn’t matter if followers are spammers and robots. It does matter if someone’s perception of me is heightened because of that number, because that person would have a false perception. No?
I guess I just don’t get why you care. I have a decent “ratio” of followers to following I suppose, and I follow only people that matter to me (or mattered to me at the point I decided to follow them). But if it turned out that 1,000 of my followers were bots, I still just…wouldn’t give a crap.
New from Jillian C. York: On Faux Nostalgia
Yeah… sorry, Ari, I’m still not getting it either. But maybe that’s because I’ve always had “previously enjoyed” cars – doesn’t matter what the mileage is, or who put it on there, as long as the car works well and gets me where I’m going.
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Forget the car then. Pick something else.
Here’s one: laid in front of me is my laptop with a keyboard. But it’s the old one with worn keys that don’t work anymore for who knows what reason. The new, replacement keyboard sits in a box waiting for me to replace the old with the new. Then, the old one will be stored with dust until recycling day happens.
Pick as many analogies as you want. Born again Christians, if you must. Same concept.
I don’t know if its true that the number of people you follow should be at minimum and shouldn’t be anywhere near the number of followers you have. I think it has something to do with earning followers not using the “mass follow” method.
Very interesting, it will be good to see what you discover in your new journey. Right now I’m experimenting with several different things on Twitter myself, and I think that’s important to keep moving, keep trying, and exploring new possibilities.
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Excellent points. I did the same thing, I previously followed everyone that followed me, and then it became to a point where Twitter was almost useless to me because I wasn’t able to actually watch people from my home page that I wanted to watch without massive amounts of boring posts and spam.
But why are using Twitter on the web, anyway, when there’s Tweetdeck, Mixero, etc for sorting.
New from Jillian C. York: On Faux Nostalgia
I can’t speak for Joel, but my non-mobile tweeting is a mix of Seesmic Desktop and Twitter.com. We know Twitter.com currently lacks sorting, but I don’t sort in Seesmic either; I follow hashtags, but not groups.
Ari,
I told you this morning that your move was interesting. Reading all this, I must say it is in fact fascinating.
You raise here two issues; first, the numbers game, highlighting once more how insane this could be, and how meaningless these numbers have become.
Even more interesting is the fact that people seem to mind more being listened when they talk/tweet than being talked to. You can have a great conversation with someone you don’t follow and who doesn’t follow you, but this appear to take him far out of his comfort zone… This wouldn’t happen if Twitter didn’t create an incredible feeling of intimacy.
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Thanks for the tweet earlier today. As you know, I’m a big fan of experimentation, but I’m concerned that there are a lot of quality people out there who may not appreciate being repeatedly “dumped” for the sake of an experiment.
Looking forward to your conclusions.
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Is not Twitter an experiment in itself? Are not processes introduced frequently to make the tool more functional?
If Twitter is an experiment, then we’re guinea pigs.
Greetings Ari!
I read this with great interest. I am new to Twitter and viewed a webinar several weeks ago presented by Sean Malarkey and Lewis Howes. It was all about getting more and more followers.
Well, I drank the Kool Aid. They said it’s all about getting your message out there and getting as many followers as you can. So, I followed instructions and in about five days I got about 900 followers. Well, most of the followers make no sense to me.
I guess this is a lot like watching a hockey game when you don’t know the strategy. I see posts that have a bunch of #’s @’s and tiny url’s that clog up my stream and promise to get me whiter teeth. Can you please give me more information about spam?
My goal has been to gather followers who would like to get to know about me and learn about my business. It is a niche so I hoped to get followers in my same business (small market) and those who thought I was clever and could liven and brighten their day. Twitter has been mostly a disappointment but I am willing to plod through this to learn.
Can you give me any suggestions as to how to weed out followers. How do I identify those who are just clogging the system. It is not as obvious as you think.
Thanks for your time.
Jude
Hi Jude,
I find it helpful to think of “followers” as “human beings” – and “social” to mean “both the business and emotion” of being connected.
In which case, you will find that a human being you connect with, will have both good and bad days. They will be relevant to your ambitions one day, and simply chatting the next.
If you have a small niche community you want to build, auto-follow on specific words should work e.g. nanotechnology would be “carbon tubes” but if you auto follow “social media” you will just get noise.
I personally manually followed my first 6,000 – they recommended me to others and while I have to use tools to narrow into specific conversations, the broad stream of content floating past is fast and interesting. Manually following up to a 1000 adds a day (now), is not possible for me, so I auto -return- follow.
YMMV as always (Your Mileage May Vary). Hope this helps.
New from Laurel Papworth: Social Media Courses: Sydney, Brisbane, Hong Kong, Singapore
Thanks for your time, Laurel. I do think of followers as people, I think that has been my frustration. Most do not think of me as a person. I feel like I’m standing in an auditorium and trying to speak in normal tones without a microphone. It’s not ego, seriously, it’s not. But, unlike how I have created my Facebook account (it’s my personal social media account) I just did the follow the targets followers plan.
That was a mistake. I grew too quickly and without a clear plan of who I REALLY wanted to connect with. As it is, I am not finding many people who do what I do on Twitter.
It’s ok though because I have learned a great deal from this. I just have to decide how far I am going to go with unfollowing people.
Again, thank you for your time.
Imagine. Signing up for an auto-follow service, then not remembering where you signed up at.
This is my boat, right now, and it sucks.
You’ve made me think about this a little differently now. I didn’t consider using multiple twitter accounts for varying services like you have. Nice, thanks for sharing that!
New from Wayne: Welcome to October, now go home
Hi Ari,
I’m glad you’ve chose a more natural approach to Twitter. This is my way of thinking since day one. It’s about interacting with people, sharing and growing. I love Twitter. Although I used to have more time for going over there and tweeting I still do that at least once a week.
The growth of my followers has been a natural one. And to me that’s the best way to grow. It’s not about the number of followers. It’s about our relationship to fellow tweeters.
People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care. I love that saying and it pretty much sums up the way I view my blog, my twitter and everything else I that I do in life.
Blessings,
Eren Mckay
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