-
Website
http://www.louisgray.com/live/ -
Original page
http://blog.louisgray.com/2009/08/to-jump-on-massive-unfollowing-trend.html -
Subscribe
All Comments -
Community
-
-
Top Commenters
-
Popular Threads
- 10 Top New Web Services of 2009 (From My Perspective)
- For All the Gloom Around RSS, Readers Continue to Climb in '09
- Growing Grumblings on Tech News Don't Answer Incentives Problems
- Mozzler Filters Your Social Stream for Links, Highlights Media
- iTunes, Sirius Seem Antiquated After Spotify iPhone Trial
Autofollow 100k people, then unfollow all of them & see what shit sticks to the wall? Lame.
" love this part of the post, however I want just to notice that what make the problem isn't the unfollow but the follow, I always tried to understand the frenetic run to have million of follower, none friend every who say Hi, this is the real life, virtual social behaviour have to be the projection of the real social behaviour, so don't follow thousand or may be million of people to end by unfollowing them. it is as easy as this, auto-follow bring the spammer to twitter, and may be to add some marketer that lake of innovation made this worst and unpleasant experience.
"selling myself short in terms of getting to potentially know the person"
But when your following 12,707 how can you get to know them? their would be too many tweets coming in and a majority would be spammers.
i do agree however that Jumping on ANY Trend is a Mistake, just because scoble starts following everyone, doesnt mean its a good strategy, as we have recently proven. in afew months he might change his mind and saying he wished he didnt unfollow everyone.
JUST BECAUSE SCOBLE DOES SOMTHING - DOESNT MEAN ITS GOOD.
Just like the rest of us he needs to test, track and fail.
what im trying to say, is that peaple shouldnt go and do something just because you (or someone else well known) do it.
This post is the different between an intelligent guy like you and a self-centered, full of himself, wannabe celebrity like Scoble.
so with the best of intentions, i set out to have as many connections as I could, believing that this would lead to better connections, finding people that i would never had heard about etc...
However the reality is totally different. As my twitter stream became totally clogged with spam, nonsnse, as I got loads of DM messages for get rich quick schemes etc... I found that even with the best filtering and grouping that I could do through Tweetdeck, that I was missing tons and tons of info.
So last night, I mass unfollowed 12,500 people, and am really pleased that I did.. I have then started to rebuild who I follow based on very strict criteria... so what have the benefits been.
Already, no spam so far, I can actually make closer, deeper connections with those that I value, and spend far more time messaging them, and indeed finding the time to comment on their blogs etc... Also for the followers that are still with me, they get better quality information, as I have more time to find the great stuff..
The irnoy of course, is that people can still contact me.. simply @markshaw me and I will see it.. Use may name, and I will see it, so I am still engaging, still listening, but now can do it far better.
best
Mark
As an amateur radio operator, I know that signal-to-noise ratio matters.
If someone follows me, I take a look at their Twitter stream. If either I know them or it seems they have content I find useful, I'll return follow. But I don't see that it helps to automatically following someone I don't know who's usually chatting about their personal life.
If I were running a business account, I'd be using a different set of rules, since the goals are different.
1. Gmail filter so Direct Messages skip the inbox and get auto-deleted
2. I've alerted my followers that if they wish to talk to private msg me to do so on FF or they should email me as I don't check DM's
3. I use TweetDeck to create groups so even as I auto-follow new people it takes something special to get to my A-List. And I also have geographic lists such as "Des Moines". This helps me ignore the crap on Twitter
Now - I have no problems with spam and Twitter is the same as it was a year ago.
Well someone like Robert can afford doing all-unfollow after all he just lost people like myself and probably 50% of spammers who follow auto-followers. By count of 20.000 followers I have I must say my followers have been pretty decent real people...yeah some get spammy but not much...
Here is the thing,
You will see lots of more people start unfollowing everyone as soon as they hit the mark of let's say 50-60K because right now avrg auto-followers are at about 20-25K (Check Wefollow.com)
So basically what I am saying is that if you hit 100K followers and lose 12K followers that's really nothing but then you have to remember who to follow back that is important to you, who you spoke before on daily/weekly basis and continue that relationship...
Robert unfortunately un-followed me or forgot that I changed my username from LiveCrunch to @JoeHobot (bastard hahaha)
Louis must say great post, keep up the good work...Oh and you know what? I sold Livecrunch! Yep I did! off to new venture of blogging at mwd :)
There is no way I would defollow any of the people following me.I have around 5000 but they are all connnected to my niche and am friends on Facebook with nearly all of them.I see Twitter as a place to have live conversation and share informtion with all those people I have built relationships with on other platforms or in real life and to gradually meet people in their networks who are drawn into our conversations.Isn`t this what Twitter is meant to be about?
@michaelqtodd
With a few months under my belt, my view has flipped somewhat on that front. Now I understand that most of those auto-followers aren't reading my tweets at all. And they likely never checked out my bio or profile page, or even know I exist for that matter, except in that their giant number grew by one increment. I felt kinda insulted actually, when that first dawned on me.
And when it comes to people who follow me, now I cast a semi-suspicious eye at them, due to the same phenomenon. (Especially if they are already following thousands.) Are they just trolling for new followers to add to their tally, or did they follow me for a real reason of some sort? Will they disappear if I don't follow them back, or if I follow and later unfollow?
It might be radical, but I want people to follow me because they like my tweets, and I think they should unfollow me if they aren't getting benefit from doing so. I don't know if it's a sign of ego or the opposite, but I want to get thousands of followers based on my merit, not by manipulating a modern form of social etiquette. I'm not crazy about the other method of growth that's in vogue, and I suspect that mass-following-inflation will ultimately be a passing phase in the evolution of the twitter community. Maybe at some point down the road, we'll be able to tell who's actually reading who, rather than these mind-boggling quasi-followings.
I have built my 8 accounts up follower by follower and am pretty sure all the people who follow me know who I am and what I do.Same for the large percentage of those that I follow.
I think it is strange if things are any other way! What is the point otherwise.
There is so much crazy emphasis on follower numbers.
"Whales" and "twitterscore" etc
I have never tweeted from anything but the web and am opposed to direct messages,autofollowing and especially "feeds" of regurgitated links.I am sure that this is not what the founders of twitter envisaged
I believe that if they do not crack down on spamming etc then someone will jump in and create a site like Twitter but with stricter rules that create a much better networking environment.
Hey did I just come up with a business opportunity??!!??
I judge who I follow by looking at their tweet-stream. I like people who are somewhat personal on Twitter. Go ahead and promote your business, your blog, your sewing club. Just, every once in a while, post something from you.
I also won't follow those who post a LOT. Example: I used to follow @zaibatsu, but had to stop. I liked a lot of the stuff he posted, but since he posted stuff every 3 minutes I couldn't see anything from the other 100 or so people I was following.
Many people mention the follow back as a twittetiquette, which explains the relative success of unfollow-those-who-dont-follow-back tools.
Admittedly, I understand the merit of a follow back as courtesy. However, people unfollowing you because of no follow back are, almost by definition, not really be interested in your voice and wouldn't have followed you in the first place if not for the increased number of the Twitter.com right hand pane.
I think that Twitter is becoming more and more content-centric and less people centric (I remember Twitter being criticized for that, compared to Plurk when were still comparable in numbers).
The search tool, RTs (and trends to a lesser extent) is what makes it one of my favorite discovery tool. The graph expands by itself without the need of following every interesting bit of discussion.
But, again, big thanks for sharing your view on that one. I'm happy to follow you ;-)