Learn to use Twitter unfollow tools to review your Twitter feed. Upset about being unfollowed? Remember it is rarely personal. It is a numbers game.
The growing popularity of Social Media such as Facebook and Twitter brings new ways of feeling inadequate or boring.
Who hasn’t glanced at their follower or friends list to discover that they have been dumped by someone they actually quite liked communicating with?
Was it something I said, something I didn’t say? Did I forget to RT her witticisms? Did she unfollow by mistake – maybe Twitter unfollowed me, it has been known to do this.
What is the best way to react to an unfollowing, and how to unfollow without causing upset or offence?
Every Twitter user has their own ‘optimal follower limit’. The amount of people they can comfortably follow without losing track. Some count their popularity by the amount of followers and always strive for more. Some prefer to have a closely knit band of friends on Twitter and are happy with just a handful of followers. At some point you will decide to unfollow people and unless they have thousands of followers they will eventually notice. Even if they do have lots of followers, they might notice.
Is it vain to check who has unfollowed you? Or only natural and a way of weeding out those who you are not communicating with? You can track who unfollowed you via different twitter unfollow tools such as whounfollowedme.com and even tweet a passive aggressive ‘I know who unfollowed me’ message to your remaining followers. I have never quite understood why you would do this, but there you are.
You can go pro on whounfollowedme.com to find out other variations of your follower / followee status and you can also check your stats with TwitterCounter to see how to get more followers. I need to tweet less, it tells me, but otherwise I score quite highly.
ManageFlitter is a useful twitter tool for managing your follower list. You can look at who is not following back, whose account is inactive, who doesn’t have a profile image. Check these accounts and unfollow those who are not communicating with you.
How do you decide to unfollow someone? I unfollow if I notice that the person never communicates with me (unless it is a corporate or high profile account, with thousands of followers). I try not to unfollow based on a single badly worded tweet, or the RTing of something offensive but might do so if it really annoyed me. I have found that my limit is around the 1000 mark – any more than this and I find it difficult to keep up. I do organise people into lists using Tweetdeck which helps me keep track of those I really consider ‘friends’, and not lose them in a stream of corporate or issue-based tweets.
A couple of times a year, I weed out my follower list, using the ManageFlitterr twitter unfollow tool. Some of them I might re-follow again at a later date, and it is rarely a decision based on the person boring/ignoring/offending me. It is simply a matter of fact decision – I can only follow a certain amount of people at once, so I have to swap people in and out.
The worst thing you can do if you have been unfollowed is tweet that person a needy ‘I saw you unfollowed me, did you mean to?’. Seriously. Don’t do this. Take it on the chin and move on.
Sometimes this is easier said than done, and of course there are times when I have been upset that a valued Twitter user has decided that they don’t want to listen to me blathering on any more. I try to justify their actions by telling myself that I do tweet quite a lot, and some people might not like this, and that maybe they are just interested in other issues than the ones that I tweet about.
It may even be that they followed me as I was tweeting about a particular topic, but have since moved on and tweet about different things.
Social Media is fast moving and ever changing. The people who tweet me at the moment are not the same people who I was communicating with when I started using Twitter (with a few notable exceptions). People come and people go, and getting caught up in numbers is bad for the self-esteem.
That's a really helpful post - especially for a Twitter novice like me - I wasn;t aware of all those tools that are available.
I agree with your last sentence. I don't need followers to feel good about myself or what I do. I never check who unfollowed me. I follow people who interest me.
I do like the new layout of your blog. The monotone colour theme says this is a serious blog, with important stuff to say.
I've been thinking a lot about what you say about having a limit. I really don't have one as I use TweetDeck and basically put people I actually interact with on one column and just let the rest...be.
Maybe that makes me a bad Twitterer. Not sure.
The thing with Twitter is that there is no Right Way and Wrong Way to do things. Everyone uses it slightly differently. I find that when I follow more than around 1000 folk, that I miss the posts from those who I really like to hear from in the waffle of corporate accounts and various blogs and newspaper reports.
This made me giggle - the "why have you unfollowed me" is a bit like, "why did you dump me" but seeing as we don't know these people in real life - just madness :)
Really interesting and I love that I can now see my stats. Thank you.
Glad it helped you ;)
Thank you so much for this, really helpful now that i can see my stats.
Made me laugh out loud about people who might actually say "why did you stop following me, did you mean to?" - hysterical.
Love what you write so keep writing
PressiesbyPebbles
Thanks, Pebbles.