What Have You Tweeted for Me Lately? *or* Burnout In Twitterville (update 5-15-10)

Update 5-15-10: If you don’t provide value the fall will continue. That’s the trend at least, after dropping nearly 1000 followees, the people continue to wake up and return the favor. But here’s the good part, I don’t have a plan or a program for growing my flock again. What I do have is a strategy to create tweets that are valuable for people who follow me. No tweets about TV shows or what I’m eating at the moment. Some about social media trends and ideas, some about leadership ideas, and some about my latest writing. AND if someone likes what I’m tweeting, I’m HOPING that that is how they begin following me. But of course there are a lot of strategies for building a Twitter following. One of them is just to follow as many people as possible, and hope that they follow back. I don’t really subscribe to this technique. I guess it’s okay if the "land grab" mentality is all that matters to you. "How many followers do YOU have?" Perhaps. But I don’t think it’s the REAL way to be. And again, that’s merely MY opinion.

BE REAL, BE REAL-TIME, AUTO-NOTHING, CONVERSE. [tha post on this]

Update 5-13-10: Flirting above 7k followers, my UFs thins my flock. Well, this was expected.

Today I spent twenty minutes UNFOLLOWING folks. I used ManageFlitter, (looks like they had to change their name from ManageTwitter) my favorite app/site for helping you do some of the heavy lifting in Tweep management. And I think in the coming days and weeks my cleaner stream might provide more valuable information.

And here’s where the return is. If I thin the heard, even my Tweetdeck tools become better at parsing out the tweets of value from the tweets of promo-mundane-eatingthis-followme-pleaseretweet-teeth whitening chatter that gives Twitter a bad name.

So unDiscovery is almost as much fun as Discovery. And ManageTwitter gives you some tools to help ID and unFollow a lot of people at once. (I can hear  you saying, "hey John, why were you following all those people anyway?" and I do have an answer for you, but let’s hold off on it for second.)

First MF puts your suspect followers in several categories for easy sorting.

And then here’s my simple process.

And one of the best things you can do is BLOCK and REPORT the obvious spam accounts. Like this:

So the fun part of this is… You can rediscover some of the folks you unfollowed, as if they were new discoveries! I mean, seriously, if you miss a tweet from Chris Brogan, it’s not gonna kill ya.

And then the next step is to examine what YOU have been tweeting. If you were to go back and look at your entire tweetstream, can you pick out some "best of" tweets?

We’re all learning this process in our own ways. Some people like to tweet about TV shows and what food they are eating or making. That’s cool, but not for me. And I’m not for everyone either. I try not to get bummed when going through the "not following you" section and learning that some of my real-life friends are no longer following me. One friend said, "I was following you for a bit, but you are insane. 90% of the time I have no idea what you are talking about. So I had to unfollow you."

(Nod.)

I get it.

@jmacofearth

permalink: http://bit.ly/unfollowthis

Check out The Twitter Way TAB for all the Tweet-related posts.

Some related posts:

• Rockin the Tweets: Twitter Tools, Twitter Lists, Stats, Discovery #Twitter
• INFOSTREAM STRATEGY #2: Tweetdeck – Putting a Dashboard Around Twitter
• TWITTER RULES: BE REAL | BE LIVE | AUTO NOTHING | CONVERSE
• Uber.la’s 1-2-3 Guide To Twitter: GETTING REAL with TWITTER
• A Tweeting Fool or a Tweeting Genius? How Do YOU Add Value to the Tweetstream?
• The Art and Science of the ReTweet Or ReTweeting with a Twist

Tags: best-of tweets, burnout in twitterville, learning twitter, ManageFlitter, ManageTwitter, tweet of value, twitter, twitter management, twitter rules, unfollowing, unfollowing tools, value-less tweeters, zen of the tweet