Are You Being Unfollowed and Not Sure Why?
On Twitter I want an active community and part of making this happen is to unfollow people that are not active users. It is sometimes hard to tell when following people how active they are, so a time will come when you will want to unfollow these people. Their bio looks great and you think they would be a great fit for your community but then you realise they are not at all active.
I use Manage Flitter to manage my Twitter account. Both for unfollowing and to auto follow people. I auto follow people sparingly and give great thought to who I am targetting.
An automated following system should complement what you are doing manually, not replace it completely. Also, Twitter does not like you using 3rd party applications (such as Manage Flitter) and is in the process of making it even harder to use by putting restrictions on which companies can integrate with it.
When I unfollow my inactive users I do so in a specific order:
- Egg heads – the first ones to go are the ones that do not have any picture at all. This is partly why I tell people it is really important to put an image there. The most important reasons is that people like to interact with people, not an picture of your book cover or some other random image. If you are a company it is not quite so bad if you use a logo. If you are waiting to get a picture taken at least put up an image of a flower or something and update it as soon as you can.
- Next are the people that have not tweeted in at least 30 days. Again, in trying to have an active community, people that have not tweeted for 30 day, or ever, are not going to be very engaging.
- The last ones that I go through are people that do not tweet at least once every day. I don’t always unfollow these people but if I am looking to unfollow more people, they are the next ones on the list.
If you fit into one of the above categories that might be why people are unfollowing you. I am certainly not the only person that uses the above criteria when choosing who to unfollow and there are a lot of people out there a lot more aggressive in this than I am.
I can tell you now that you will be looking to do a lot of unfollowing when you are trying to break through the 2000 barrier on Twitter. You can only follow more than 2000 people once approximately 2000 people are following you. It might take weeks or even a couple of months to cross the barrier and you will spend quite a bit of time following and unfollowing people. If you are cleaning up your twitter account, using the criteria above is a great place to start.
I know when you first start out it can be a bit daunting and you are not sure what to post. Next week I am sharing how to easily find at least 5 things to tweet each and every day.
I would love to hear your unfollow strategies and which programs you use to do it. Please leave your comments below.
Stacey Myers is a business and online marketing trainer, speaker and social media strategist accredited with the Relationship Marketing Institute. She mentors authors and writers in building relationships and community online.
