Now Trending On Twitter: Mass Unfollowing
It’s not something that will likely place on Twitter’s (largely redundant and abused) trending topics feature, but we’re now starting to see what I think will increasingly become a major focal point for all serious Twitter users over the next few weeks and months – network optimisation.
Robert Scoble is doing it. Chris Brogan is doing it (at the moment he’s no longer auto-following, but he’ll have to unfollow thousands to eliminate his spam problem). Jesse Stay is writing about it.
Why? Because Twitter simply doesn’t work when you follow thousands and thousands of people. This kind of madness leads to:
- Direct message abuse (so much spam that using the system becomes folly)
- Too much noise in your stream, and because of this
- It’s too difficult to filter out the good stuff, which means
- You end up not actually following anybody at all
Groups and userlists in external apps like TweetDeck and Seesmic Desktop help, but if you’re filtering your network down to a small number and focusing entirely on that, why are you even following the people who don’t make the cut?
Prepare yourself for the inevitable backlash – accusations of snobbery and arrogance and all that jazz – but following thousands and thousands of people is not, and never was, the future.
I like Jesse’s idea for a Facebook-esque feature on Twitter that lets users opt out of receiving any updates from a given application. You can unfollow a person, but that’s a fairly drastic step when it’s more of an issue with auto-messaging.
Last week I used an external application to ‘see’ what Scoble saw on Twitter, and believe me, it wasn’t pretty. I’m not shocked at what he’s done. I am surprised that he didn’t do it months ago.
Of course, not everybody will adopt this policy of mass unfollowing, even though it makes absolute sense. Those who can only get 20,000 followers because they follow 22,000 won’t do it. Spammers and mass-marketers won’t do it. And anyone who thinks the direct message system is a great way to provide you with a fantastic opportunity to buy their worthless crap isn’t going to risk losing your business with an unfollow, either.
For everybody else, it’s the intelligent decision. Here’s a tip: whatever your network size is now, try reducing your following number to (at most) 50 per cent of your followers. 25 per cent is better still. You’re not taking much of a risk as you can always follow people back later. (Of course, if they unfollowed you as soon as you unfollowed them, then it was the right thing to do.)
Now take a deep breath, and look around. Nice, isn’t it?
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here’s the thing, while i have never been a big fish on twitter i did something like a this a few months back when i felt twitter was becoming too noisy for me, and i locked my updates too. so i do agree that you do need to figger how to optimise twitter to get the most out of it for you.
but then do you rememeber your post about celebs not following users back? i suspect some users following a popular figure on twitter might feel a little cheated if they have since been unfollowed. because it might appear to some that these public profiles have just been in the process of building up a huge following just so that they can push information to followers as and when they please. i do accept that such public figures are followed not just because of who they are but probably also on the basis that they follow back too.
me? am disappointed that one @paulocoelho has just carried out a mass unfollow. he has tweeted that he will follow those who request a follow, but i’ve got locked updates and cannot be bothered.
.-= fudgeit´s last blog ..i’m right, i’m always right =-.
Quite. I’m not proposing for a second that you mass-follow people to accumulate a large number, then mass-unfollow and see who’s left, making you look like a celebrity. That’s a known scam/trick on Twitter and always stinks.
I’m just saying make sure the people you’re following are *only* the ones you’re genuinely interested in. Unfollow anybody else. Reduce the noise, increase the signal. Even if your “signal” is just chatting with your friends, this method still reaps huge rewards.
My problem with a lot of the celebrity accounts was that many of them were following less than a dozen people. Twitter doesn’t work like that, either – out of 20-25m users, everybody can find a few hundred who are interesting, surely?
Figure out what you want to learn about and follow accordingly. Following simply for the sake of it (or to be polite) is a big, big fail.
“I’m just saying make sure the people you’re following are *only* the ones you’re genuinely interested in. Unfollow anybody else. Reduce the noise, increase the signal. Even if your “signal” is just chatting with your friends, this method still reaps huge rewards.”
totally agree!
.-= fudgeit´s last blog ..i’m right, i’m always right =-.
What about behaviorally targeting other twitterers to put together a relevant stream? MyTrybe launched last week and does just that.
http://www.mytrybe.com
I agree. I wrote a post back in April about this very concept.
http://mattbrowne.com/blog/spring-cleaning-feeds-followers-and-favorites/
I don’t have near the following the leaders you’ve mentioned do; and even I found that I was missing key Tweets by the influencers.
The noise was just too pervasive and the Twitter tools are just too rudimentary to handle it all.
I suggest extending this concept to your Reader, Facebook, and FriendFeed. Your subconscious mind will thank you.
About a month ago, I got wondering how many of my “followers” were “fauxlowers” (following so many people that they couldn’t possibly be reading what everyone was tweeting), so I built an app that uses the Twitter API to get all my followers’ friend counts (didn’t want to do that manually!).
The result? 81.9% of my followers are over the limit I chose of 75 friends. http://fauxlowers.com/-/AntoneRoundy Sort of makes you feel like your tweets are trees falling in an empty forest!
Thanks.Great article. I wrote a story about this on my blog recently. You may enjoy reading it. They still want you to follow them and buy their wares though. AskDKLive just followed this same tactic. He now follows 39 people and he just posted his new youtube training course on his page and he hopes his 9,000 plus followers buy it. Give me a break. Here is my story, click the link:http://johnrothstein.net/2009/07/why-dont-the-so-called-gurus-follow-you-back-on-twitter-the-john-reese-file/
I agree that you can’t possibly follow thousands, but why not open a second account just to follow the people you wish to instead of unfollowing thousands? If I had 95k followers like Scoble, that’s what I would do. I can see he already lost 2 thousand followers since yesterday.
.-= Audrey Chernoff´s last blog ..Transform Just-My-Job Statements into Resume Accomplishments =-.
“Because Twitter simply doesn’t work when you follow thousands and thousands of people. ”
No kidding. Please don’t hold these people up as examples of what to do. It was intuitively obvious that they couldn’t really follow more than 1000 or so folks and even hope to keep up on the stream of information that came in. This was all about their egos to start and this latest move is nothing but act 2 of a bunch of prima donnas.
We’ve seen this play out before… Myspace, Facebook, etc… “Oh, look at me, i have SO MANY followers.” It was an ego stroke then, it was an ego stroke to get tons of followers on Twitter and it’s an ego stroke to dump them now. The rules for following on Twitter are easy – follow people you know, follow people who are saying interesting things regularly, especially things you’re not hearing from elsewhere. You’ll almost never end up with more than a few hundred if you do that. Problem solved. Ego issues can be dealt with in therapy.
Rick, I’ve pretty much always held “these people” as an example of what not to do.
That said, I don’t think admitting you’ve made a mistake and starting over is necessarily a negative. People can always choose to unfollow accordingly (as many will).
Scoble had it coming. I like the guy, but I unfollowed him more than a year ago when his signal-to-noise ratio got out of whack.
Of course what we all tend to forget is that MOST of ALL of these discussions about Twitter apply only to a very, very small subset of users. Power users, to be sure, but a small subset anyway.
.-= Sarah Vela´s last blog ..Do The – Unexpected – Right Thing =-.
I wrote about this back in March. My solution was to have multiple accounts for specific topics. It’s been working pretty well for me.
Pressing Reset On Social Media – Time For Segmentation
Yeah, except that human beings can’t be compartmentalized that way. Trying to pigeonhole a fellow human being is doing them, and you, a disservice.
.-= Ray Beckerman´s last blog ..Who is the "guru" of Twitter? for me it’s @BuzzEdition =-.
For those of us who have vetted people we follow back, and are only following people we want to follow, mass unfollowing is completely unnecessary.
I can’t for the life of me understand why you think there are many who have made the mistake you describe.
You are talking about a “problem” which exists only for a handful of people who were motivated by some incorrect abstract theory that it would be a great idea to “follow” — in name only — those who followed them, rather than concentrate on building real relationships.
.-= Ray Beckerman´s last blog ..Who is the "guru" of Twitter? for me it’s @BuzzEdition =-.
What a strange response. There are tens of thousands of Twitter users who follow as many or more people than follow them, and thousands who follow tens of thousands. Chris Brogan and Guy Kawasaki still do. When Twitter first started, it was an entirely common practice to follow everybody back out of courtesy.
In the last 24 hours, both @firefox and @ChrisPirillo have unfollowed (almost) everybody and started over. They’re hardly inexperienced.
Of course mass unfollowing is unnecessary – that doesn’t mean it hasn’t taken place (en masse), or that lessons haven’t been learned. And as I outlined in the piece it’s not just the mass-marketers or spammers who have been guilty of this practice: in many cases it’s the thought leaders and influencers. Everybody makes mistakes.
Agreed. At fauxlowers.com, I’m tracking 649,133 Twitter users. The average (mean) number of “friends” is 1,071. The median number is 491, which is a lot more than I personally think are really possible to keep up with. 6,275 of them are “following” more than 10,000 people.