Last week, I was honored to share this post on Stanford Smith’s blog, Pushing Social. This sparked a great discussion and I wanted to make sure you had a chance to read it and weigh in.
An excerpt from the post is below.
Be sure to head over to Stan’s blog to read the full post and share your thoughts in the comment section. I’d love to hear what you think about this!
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In the past few weeks, a number of big-named bloggers dumped all of the people they followed on Twitter in one felt swoop.
First,
Chris Brogan did it. Then,
Michael Hyatt did it.
It didn’t take long for dozens of others to follow suit, creating a domino effect across the Twittersphere.
Although this idea might seem harsh, the reasons for doing it are valid — rampant twitter spam, full inboxes of direct messages and the fact that they really couldn’t keep up with more than 100,000 followers anyway.
The real reason many of these folks have ended up in this predicament in the first place is because they automated their following efforts. Every time someone followed one of these folks, they automatically followed that person back.
Although that sounds good in theory, they ended up following a list bloated with spam and other
slimy individuals and businesses.
So, now they’re forced to wipe the slate clean and start from scratch.
And, the results have been positive for them.
They have reclaimed their inbox and found Twitter to be more useful.
But, Should You Do It?
This approach certainly isn’t for everyone. It all boils down to your particular situation, your
social media strategy and the goals for your business.
For instance, are you using Twitter to raise awareness about your brand,
deepen relationships with your customers and prospects or
drive traffic to your blog?
You need to have a good understanding of how you want Twitter to help your business or blog before you can best determine how to use it.
Want to read the rest? Check out the full post at Pushing Social.
8 replies on “Should You Unfollow Everyone on Twitter?”
I think when you stop following your followers it’s rude and the people that follow these bloggers should be offended and I will explain why. I follow a lot of blogger and tweet tons of stuff a day. You might not like all my tweets but guess what a few of them are yours and if you can’t suck it up and deal with it maybe you should quit twitter all together.
I wouldn’t stop following someone because they sent me a legit DM or tweeted tons of articles. I bet half the people Chris and Michael stopped following are still re tweeting their articles and to me that’s disrespectful and uncalled for. If you can’t’ follow the people that tweet your articles what does that say about you?
Maybe I’m thinking too much into this but if I knew someone I tweet daily stopped following me just because they wanted to needless to say they won’t be seeing any tweets from me in the future!
You bring up a good point – people really need to think of what this unfollowing approach says to their followers. While I don’t think anyone “owes” it to someone to follow back, it does put a sour taste in people’s mouths when
That said, I do see their point – it really is impossible to truly follow and engage with 100,000+ people.
And, following back offers somewhat of a false sense of attention. But, what it does do, is open the door for that to happen.
The bottom line is that it all really boils down to your goals and what you’re hoping to accomplish with Twitter in the first place.
The ironic thing is that those that went this route could have simply cleaned their Inboxes and used the same tool they did for the UnFollow to keep all the spam filtered. But hey, it’s not like any of them did it as a stunt to get people talking about them again, and increasing their blog rank on AdAge, is it…? 😉
Totally. And, it wouldn’t have been necessary if they weren’t autofollowing to begin with.
Chris admitted it was an experiment for him. It’s clear it was more than just a tidy inbox he was after. What I found interesting is that Michael Hyatt, in his blog post about this, said he was doing it to improve his Klout score. Now THAT was surprising to me.
Far too many people “collect” followers like it is some sort of race to prove power/influence. It is an easy decision to not follow someone who apparently doesn’t have a clue or a strategy for their social media participation.
Very true, Paul. Without a strategy, it will be hard to get anywhere with your efforts.
I think to unfollow everyone on twitter is not good because we live here as a give and take so the more people you follow, you have a chance also to follow you and support your blog or your tweet.
Fascinating! I’d been seeing tidbits of this on the stream. I expect those with that many followers would enjoy a better Twitter experience, for sure. Wonder how long it took to delete 100,000 followers?? Dang, that’s a lot of peeps.