I look at the people I was following last week on twitter and thought, “what’s the point”.
It’s a useful question to ask regularly in this ever changing online World. A few months ago it made sense to follow lots of people, becoming a human vacuum cleaner of peoples thoughts. The problem is with that, if you have too many you tend to pick up all kinds of stuff.
So I rolled up my sleeves and manually defollowed about 2,000. I didn’t want to trust a script and wanted to get a real look at who I was following. I don’t think I knew any of those 2k, some straight away defollowed me back which made me think, “why were you following me in the first place?” I follow people who don’t follow me back as I value what they have to say.
I also Anglicised my feed, it’s not that I have been infected with a strain of jingoism, but my online business is mostly aimed at habitants of these ancient Isles.
Anyone who was a “social enthusiast” in somewhere like Topeka who mostly talked about the sexual habits of their cat got dropped. But the UK versions did not. Anyone who claimed to be an expert in their bio got dropped or guru or MLM etc.
Also, I used to rely on Tweetdeck, but then I realised I was missing all what was in my raw feed and there was good stuff. Looking at the raw feed now I don’t really need Tweetdeck to organise groups.
And what happens when Twitter gets bought out and they turn off the api.
Or do you think that could never happen?
Have that in writing do you?
There was a case for having thousands of people following you on twitter which was easy to get, you just followed people you knew would follow back then delete the ones who don’t. Only it’s so easy that it has lost it’s value.
What is of high value now is the ratio of people you follow to who follows you. Plus the quality of the people you follow, you really can learn some stuff from people.
It’s never going to be perfect, but I have made using Twitter a lot more interesting than it was.
So if I follow you now, I really mean it. And if you have the hump because I no longer follow you, it’s not personal, mostly.
If you are worthy find a way to contact me and let me know.
You can defollow me here http://twitter.com/lyndoman