Are You Crippled By Unfollow Fear?
Completely by accident, the theme on Twittercism this week has been about network optimisation. You can read previous posts on this topic here and here.
Often when I speak to Twitter folk (and this includes clients) about cutting down on the huge amounts of people they’re following to improve the relevancy and value of their network, I get this response:
“I don’t like to unfollow people in case they unfollow me.”
These people suffer from unfollow fear. I find this attitude slightly baffling. Why do we choose to unfollow people? Because for various reasons they’re not right for us. If they then choose to unfollow us back, doesn’t that actually confirm our actions?
If you can only get ten thousand people to follow you because you’re following eleven thousand, something isn’t right. Your network isn’t relevant, it doesn’t have much value and it certainly isn’t optimised.
Let’s say you’re following ten thousand people, and the same number are following you. One day you wake up and decide to put an end to the madness, and unfollow everybody on your list. What’s the worst thing that can happen? That you’ll lose everybody who was following you?
So?
All this tells us is that these individuals were using auto-follow and unfollow tools and likely weren’t paying any attention to you at all, excluding the occasional lip service. Most people don’t even realise when somebody has unfollowed them. If you drop somebody and they immediately drop you, it’s because they’re using a script. And good riddance, because the two of you never made a valid connection, and never will.
The reality is, if you follow ten thousand and drop 95 per cent of them, you’re not going to lose 9,500 followers. You’ll probably lose just a few thousand, tops, and the ones that leave didn’t care anyway.
But the followers that are left? The ones that continue to hang around? That’s a different story. That’s where you’ll find your relevance. They followed you because you looked interesting and they stayed with you because you are.
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Hadn’t realised that there was a lot of auto-followers out there. Certainly a pointless connection to the network if that’s the case. And when it comes to the unfollowing, as you said, I don’t think anyone really pays much attentio to those that unfollow. I certainly don’t. If someone is tweeting things that either don’t interest me or are plainly SPAM then they are going in the unfollow pile, no second thoughts.
I think many people feel the same rules of social etiquette apply to Twitter as to other social situations. Ironically, for all the talk of “relationship building,” we’re actually sending a mixed message here to say “what difference does it make if they unfollow you?” To some, it’s obligatory to follow those who follow you – to return a compliment or gesture of “friendship.” Then, once on that hamster wheel, it would likewise be considered “rude,” “insulting,” or “hurtful” to unfollow someone. And if someone unfollows you, by golly, you unfollow them back – for revenge!
For a while, I auto-followed people. Then word apparently got out that I did, and suddenly every self-proclaimed “SEO guru” on the planet started following ME. I no longer auto-follow or auto-DM (In fact, I’ve gotten so “rude” I don’t even bother sending a “thank you tweet” manually; I assume you had your reasons for following and hope I don’t disappoint – that’s my “thank you.” If I do, you can unfollow – no hard feelings.)
Some days, I really despise “Web 2.0″ with all its ratings, rankings, and popularity polls and indicators. It’s just like high school and twice as tiresome.
.-= Holly Jahangiri´s last blog ..Muscle Cramps: Twisted Like a Pretzel =-.
It only starts to resemble a relationship if you engage after the follow.
This is essentially my point – a +1 or -1 on your follow/following count means absolutely nothing unless you then go on to make a connection with that person. There is no mixed message; I only found it confusing when somebody unfollows me when we had a high level of engagement. Then it’s more like offline social situations; otherwise, it’s just strangers passing in the night.
I don’t think it’s rude to not send a ‘thank you’ tweet at all. It’s nowhere near as bad as the auto-DMs (you were being personable after all) but it isn’t necessary. As you say, if somebody has followed you, they’ve already got their reasons. It’s then up to all of us to make the right impression.
I concur about the rankings, and so on, but that kind of thing is easy enough to ignore, and if you choose to take part, it’s always best to do so with a healthy dose of skepticism.
I can take or leave the rankings, but what gets me is the people who take them SO seriously and get so hurt, or angry, or elated when in fact, they mean next to nothing. Again, rankings and ratings are emotionally charged in ways we can’t begin to fathom, because we all see them differently but most people seem to assume everyone approaches them with the same set of objective criteria, and that’s just not the case.
Oddly enough, last night I decided to revise the list of people I follow.
I ended up cutting about a third of the people I follow and fully expected my follower account to take a hit. 12 hours later and about 6% of my followers have (auto-)unfollowed me. Doesn’t make any difference to me. Like you say, anyone who auto-(un)follows is more than likely just playing the numbers game and not actually interested in engaging with more than a few people, if any.
I mainly used the Friend or Follow tool to make decisions about who to cut. First of all, anyone who hadn’t tweeted for more than about 2 months was automatically expunged. I don’t expect everyone to be a chatterbox, but a 2 month gap between tweets either means they don’t consider Twitter to be something worth using regularly or else real life has intervened.
I then took a look at all the people who were following me who I wasn’t following back. The vast majority of these were spammers, but there were a few interesting connections I overlooked, so I made sure I started following them.
Then I took a look at all the mutual follows. Oddly enough, most of the culls came from here. A large number of them were the typical SEO gurus and social media experts who follow 30,000 people and have 30,000 people following them back. A lot of people I followed back when those “100 people you should follow to get more followers” articles were floating around. I think everyone goes through this phase at some point in their Twitter life. It feels good to get a significant boost in followers, but you later come to realise that most of these connections are essentially worthless. After this purge, anyone left was either someone I engage with regularly or someone with the potential for engagement where it’s never really happened. Had to cut quite a few of the latter.
Then I took a look at all the people I follow who don’t follow me back. This list largely comprises celebrities and link dumping bots for the big blogs. In either case they provide interesting material but I don’t necessarily expect them to follow me, so I kept most of these. That left a number of people who I consider peers, who I’ve made many attempts to engage with, but for some reason never bother to reciprocate. I kept the ones who actually post interesting tweets. Those who just post about what they had for breakfast or how drunk they were last night got kicked.
All in all, a cathartic experience. It also gave me the opportunity to re-categorize everyone in TweetDeck. I’m sure I’ll accumulate more junk in the years ahead, but for now I’ve got a nice clean Twitter stream to paddle around in.
I won’t be paying too much attention to my follower count. An optimized Twitter stream will give me more opportunities to engage with people I may have overlooked before. At the end of the day, that’s more important than an arbitrary follower count that rarely has any bearing on your Twitter experience.
.-= Mark´s last blog ..Modern vs Retro (MSNBC Lays Down the Smack) =-.
Right on! I totally agree w/your thought process for cleaning “house.” I need to explore TwitDeck at some point.
You know, I find it funny that all of these blog posts seam to assume that we follow, and are followed by lots of people. I happen to have 60 followers, and I have a felling that a good 30-40 of them are bots. Do I care, not really, I don’t want to make a huge follower list, unless my followers are actually interested in following me.
Absolutely – and it’s been the main theme of this week. See this post.
i think it is important to follow only those u are interested. if u follow everyone who’s following you, then it is a waste of time to read twitter as 1000 twits coming a day.
.-= littleoslo´s last blog ..Kung Fu Super Baozi VS Sushi Men =-.
For example, compare these two charts:
http://twittercounter.com/louisgray/all/friends
http://twittercounter.com/louisgray/all/followers
It's not the same graph.
For me, following is more about friendship that numbers, so I take a slightly different tack on it.
First, I have been hesitant to unfollow someone that I wanted to (because they became boring, or whatever), but was reluctant to because I didn't want to hurt their feelings. In those cases, I did make a connection; but not enough for it to be a lifetime commitment. Still, I didn't want to hurt their feelings. (The new platform Brizzly – which I'm liking more and more each day – allows me to “mute” someone without unfollowing them. So that's been a godsend.)
Secondly, I disagree with: “If you drop somebody and they immediately drop you, it’s because they’re using a script. And good riddance, because the two of you never made a valid connection, and never will.” I HAVE had people drop me shortly after I dropped them, and we had made a valid connection. They weren't using a script. But they were using a notification service, which notified them when I unfollowed.
(Frankly, I see a lot of merit to those. If someone I know unfollows me, I'd like to know about it. And knowing about it when it happens might help me to pinpoint if it's tied to any particular tweet or conversation.)
So I think there are valid reasons to be concerned with not unfollowing someone.
Of course there are, but that wasn't really the point of the piece, which was focusing more on folks who are afraid to unfollow anybody because it may mean a drop in their own numbers, too. Which is a ludicrous attitude.
Regarding the unfollow scripts, if somebody unfollows you immediately after you unfollow them, then there was no connection there. It doesn't matter if it's manual or automated, really. If they're only following you because you're following them (and/or vice versa), then you're better off parting ways. And it's worth noting that a script was still involved.
Speaking of which, there's no better notification tool than SocialToo, which sends you a nice, once-a-day email listing all your new follows and unfollows. Worth checking out!
Yes, I realize that wasn't the point of the piece. And so my comments were a little out of context. Still, regardless of the context, the part about there being no connection if someone unfollows you because they're using a script is just wrong.
Even defining a “script” as anything, even just a notification e-mail (as opposed to the way I would define it, which is something that automatically follows/unfollows), that still doesn't negate the point.
If someone uses a “script” in that they receive notification whenever someone unfollows them, and then they choose to unfollow you, that doesn't mean there wasn't a “connection.” It could mean several things.
1) It could mean that the connection was there, but wasn't very deep. When you unfollow them, they reciprocate, since they're not interested in a one-way connection. But to say there was “no connection” simply because it may not have been a close connection is simply false.
2) It may have been a close connection, and the person may be offended by the unfollow, and may reciprocate because they're offended or their feelings are hurt. Again, unfollowing here doesn't mean there wasn't a connection. In fact, in this case, it may actually be proof of a connection.
If someone that I had a very close connection to unfollowed me, I'd probably send them a note asking about it (though I wouldn't be able to DM). But there's a wide range of people short of that, with whom I don't have a deep connection, but with whom I still have a substantial connection, with whom, if they unfollowed me, I'd probably unfollow back, simply because I'm offended. That doesn't mean there was no connection there.
It's not 'just wrong'. In my experience in the *vast* majority of cases an automated unfollow following a manual one at your end means there was little to no connection. There are always going to be exceptions, but that's the norm. Sometimes people using auto-unfollowers later follow back (once they realise you've gone), but the majority are never seen again.
I think we're confusing my use of the word 'connection'. I just don't mean you've exchanged a couple of tweets some time in the past. I'm talking predominately about the accounts that follow tens of thousands of people here. They don't notice and most of the time they don't care. Those following just a couple of hundred or less do notice, and often will care.
The SocialToo emails allow me to see all this happening and in those cases where it seems an unusual decision (because there IS a connection) then like you I'll usually follow it up. Often this reveals that it was a mistake, or the other user is having a big reboot and you got caught up in that. Sometimes it's very intentional, and the information sent back as to why that decision was made can be of some benefit.
And yes, sometimes feelings to get hurt. It's real people, after all. But if you just boot somebody simply and only because they booted you, without finding out what happened and why, then I'd argue that any 'connection' probably wasn't all that important to either of you. It became simply a matter of saving face and personal pride, which is an absolutely valid, but very different thing.
Well, I think we're talking about two different things here. I'm not talking about automatic unfollows. I'm talking about unfollows that happen within an hour or two because a person received notification. It all hinges on what is meant by “they immediately drop you.” Does “immediately” mean within a minute or two, or within an hour or two?
In any case, the only issue I had was the absolute terms you couched your statement in. “It’s because they’re using a script”; “the two of you never made a valid connection, and never will.” I don't think those statements are absolutely true.
If you're saying, on the other hand, “most of the time” and “probably,” then I don't have a problem with it. But I don't think your statements apply to every situation where someone drops you shortly after you drop them, is all I'm saying.
I follow people that I want to talk with or listen to. I expect people to evaluate me in the same way in these venues.