Ever since a few key, influential people cleaned out their Twitter accounts a while back by mass unfollowing, it seems to be a huge trend with everyone else these days. I am noticing more and more people cleaning out their account by pretty much unfollowing everyone they followed, and then maybe keeping a few select people. I guess no matter how much I see these people explain their actions, I am still confused as to why they do it to begin with. The main reason these people give for doing it is that their Twitter stream is getting too “noisy” and full of spam, so they are missing relevant tweets. Ok fair enough, however when they decided to friend everyone and their mother in the Twittersphere in the beginning, did they think their Twitter timeline would be neat and uncluttered? I mean come on! My favorite is when they broadcast their actions over and over on their Twitter timeline and then write a blog about it. Seriously, just do it and be done with it. In my humble opinion, some of these people just want the attention.
I have no problems with how people chose to use Twitter. I think that certain people chose to “clean up their account” so they look like a Twitter celebrity. Yes I know this may sound silly but come on, you know it’s true! Maybe follow a couple hundred people compared to the multiple thousands that follow them back. Over time, that number will start to dwindle. Most people want reciprocity on Twitter (it is after all social media) and when they see that they were “used”, they unfollow the people back.
I know what you may be thinking; I only follow people who follow back. Not true at all. There are quite a few key people, corporations, non-profits, etc that I will always follow who do not follow everyone back however when you are someone who obviously games the system to look like a Twitter celebrity and delivers no useful content, then what’s the point? This is SOCIAL media, after all.
Hi Monica,
Interesting article, I think you touched on a good point in that people just haven’t really thought through the potential ‘noise’ they may get if they just follow everyone. It’s like Facebook, where in the beginning, everyone will just ‘friend’ everyone and every request and eventually people complain their privacy is compromised. Now, with Twitter, I think people are beginning to realise most of people they follow just generate noise.
For example, with me, I follow those that I find interesting and deal with most often. There’re others that I know very little about or may deal with in the future, I put them into various ‘lists’. ‘Lists’ is a great feature, which I think people need to be educated more. You hardly see ‘lists’ being included in any beginner’s guide.
Secondly, as to being a Twitter celebrity, as you mentioned, I think people think having lots of followers isn’t enough. People are analysing the ratio of ‘follower’ vs ‘followee’, i.e., for every people you follow, x people follow you. Some people will just want to move up the Twitter celebrity ladder. It’s not necessarily about reciprocity, I suspect some people don’t even read their feeds, they just want to appear that lots of people read what they say, as if it’s important.
For me, yes, there’re more people that follow me than vice versa, but I don’t know a lot of the people that follow me. I don’t care if these people follow me or not. If someone follows me just because they think I’ll follow them, they need to grow up.
Anyway, enough babbling…
Thanks so much for your comment!
Just to clarify, this article is meant for the handful of people out there who really are doing the mass unfollow only to brag about it on their timeline and then go on to write a blog about it in an effort to get traffic to their website and the attention. It pretty much gets to be a numbers game with them instead of using Twitter as a true social media outlet.
You bring up a good point on the new lists feature which I plan on writing about on a separate post.
I really appreciate your thoughts!
I agree Monica. It’s silly and self absorbed. Clean up your twitter stream by using lists or friendfeed or something. Slowly but surely those they unfollowed and blogged about it will return the favor
If someone thinks your “noise” in their stream why would you want to continue following them? Ok I’m off to delete most of my contacts in my email because they’re so much noise in there 
I just did a mass purge the other week. I don’t get those who have follow and have followers over 3,000 ppl. I know it’s a recip thing, but it just become too much noise. I also cut those who don’t respond
Great points! you know what a kind of liberating thing to do is? Mass un follow most of your material possessions. Starting fresh. However, mass unfollowing in twitter is like suddenly not being friends with all your friends. thats dumb
It just makes no sense to me when people that have nothing to offer game the system like that. It’s pretty pointless. I know there are a few key people that did this to basically cut out the noise and spam and I will always continue to follow them because they provide great content and still continue to engage their network.