Today I started to shrink the list of people I”m following. I have been following nearly 17,000 people and in all honesty, it’s just way too much. Everyone”s tweets get lost in a sea of updates unless I happen to have them separated into a column in Tweetdeck. Frankly, I can’t keep up.
If I had my way, I would like to cut about 10,000 people from my list. I can easily manage following 6,000 – 8,000 people by using Tweetdeck. If that number still seems high to you just consider that everyone posts updates at different times of the day so it”s not like I”m being constantly flooded with tweets at that follower number.
I’ve been wanting to do this for a little while now but have procrastinated because I know how much effort it is going to take to do what I need to do. But at the prompting from Rhodester, I jumped in and unfollowed almost a thousand people today.rnrnI had some particular qualifications in mind for who I was going to snip from my list, and those standards are:
- Spammers – This was an easy call. I don”t want my timeline cluttered with garbage, so anyone I saw tweeting anything about “teeth whitening”, “$125 in 24 hours” or anything of the like was instantly cut.
- MLM – You like MLM marketing? Good for you, but I don”t and don”t want to be bothered with it.
- Affiliates – I feel the same about affiliate marketing as I do with MLM marketing.
- Foreign Languages – There”s absolutely nothing wrong with people on Twitter who don”t speak English as near as I can tell. It”s just that I don”t understand you and don”t want to have to translate your tweets. Sorry.
- Bots – Those who use software to generate tweets were ceremoniously cut. I find that to be incredibly lame.
- Linkers – You know those people on Twitter who do nothing but post updates with links and never interact with anyone? Yeah, I don”t need that either. That”s just media, and I thought this was social media.
- News – I have been following umpteen people on Twitter that just post news links in a cornucopia of topics. I don”t want that anymore. If I want the news, I”ll go get it myself.
While scanning my timeline I also ran across a few other odd people that I unfollowed as well, probably because I found something they just posted to be a little too out there for my tastes.
People get followed and unfollowed on Twitter thousands upon thousands of times a day, but apparently some people take an unfollow a little personal as I found out. Shortly after I unfollowed one person I received this response:
I guess unfollowing makes you cool
Ain”t Twitter grand!
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