UPDATE: 12-8-09: Updating the stats from a four day unfollowing spree!
My followers count has dropped from 7082 to 6708, or a LOSS of 374 followers. ;-0
My following stream has dropped from 7498 to 5894, or a DROP of 1604! ;-)
Thats a 4-to-1 ratio. Drop 4 and 1 of them will unfollow you.
And I tell you, it is as much fun figuring out who to UNFOLLOW these days as it was figuring out who TO follow. Give it a whirl, not with my tweets please.
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I have been culling who I'm following lately. And once I got going I was fairly ruthless. Several criteria came up for me as I began the process of separating the noise from the signal.
What I DO NOT LIKE:
1. Quote posts. If you don't have anything original to say, don't tweet.
2. Going to the bathroom posts. Lunch, bathroom, diet coke, i'm not really interested.
3. What I'm eating posts. Foodies unite, I'm just not that into it.
4. I'm so sexy posts. If your avatar is too suggestive… what are you selling? I'm probably not buying.
5. Your tweets are all about SELLING, deals, offers, bargans, specials, coupons, nope, not interested.
6. You don't have a real name on your bio.
7. You don't have a real link on your bio.
8. Your twitter ID contains SEO, SEM, MLM, Realtor, Super, Guru, Money, Success, Coach. Um… to me you need to show in your content and thoughts not in your cute twitter ID.
9. All you do is RT. It's fine to RT smart stuff, but you should be generating some smart stuff yourself.
10. Your tweets are repetitive and uninspiring. As Seth Godin says in Tribes, no one forwards a boring email, same for Tweets.
11. Your posts are more like newsfeeds than original content. I don't need any more RSS inputs, thanks.
And then I've just unfollowed some folks just because…
What I DO LIKE:
1. Original thinking.
2. Insightful observations on social media, pr, marketing, innovation, green, entrepreneurship.
3. Something funny. You have a knack for making me smile for no reason at all. (I have a thing for tweeting cats.)
4. I know you. (I will admit to unfollowing friends who fall under the fault category too many times.
Here is my TwitterCounter stat for people I'm following:
So the triage has been harsh on my followers as well. A tit for tat kinda repercussion, I imagine. Here is my TwitterCounter stat for people who follow me:
And then you get people like this fella who took offense at me saying I was unfollowing folks that quoted or mentioned Tiger Woods.
And his snipes went down from there. I don't now where he came from or what prompted his vitriol, but he seems to have begun targeting others with his wiseacre comments. You can find him yourself if you want to see how repetitive his pestering became.
Ah but the balance is returning. Less empty tweets, fewer empty followers. And Mr. Badera, I'm not labeling them, I'm just sayin, my tastes are different.
Learning all the time. And what I am learning from this Twitter drop is I need something to energize my enthusiasm about Twitter. It's kinda spammy and boring. Lists are cool. Groups are cool. Tweetdeck is indispensable. But getting "value" out of Twitter these days is dependent on my own participation and aggressive weeding.
@jmacofearth
permalink: http://bit.ly/reducing-noise
Two super cats that tweet: Sockington and Sparklecat.
A few more Twitter-related posts:
