2 days ago I made a big change in the way I use Twitter and unfollowed everyone but the people I actually interact with through Twitter (I unfollowed close to 1,000 users). It was a drastic step but it was something I needed to do after following anyone and everyone blindlessly for a few months. Many of the people I followed were simply people who followed me.

The number of people who follow me is not something I’m overly concerned about. I knew that by unfollowing so many people the number of people who followed me would drastically drop.

I reviewed my follower count yesterday a few times to see how it was being effected. Whilst I knew that it would drop, I was surprised at how quick it was dropping. In less than 24 hours I had lost over 350 of the 1370 people who were following me, a drop of 25%.

This illustrates two things :

• My Twitter follower count was inflated. These people had no interest whatsoever in who I am, what I do or what I had to say. I think it’s safe to that a large percentage of everyones users aren’t ‘really following’ them.
• Many users use Twitter applications to either check who is not following them back or to do it automatically via a script. I know this because I do this myself with my ‘newsbot’ accounts.

It’s hard for me to criticize anyone who unfollowed me because I wasn’t doing it back because I have done it myself in the past. I used to be of the opinion that it was rude if someone I followed didn’t follow me back.

Which leads me to my point : Most Twitter Users Don’t Care Who They Follow, They Only Care Who Follows Them

I know this because I used to think that way too. For some people this won’t be a problem. If you tweet away every day abd only check @replies then it doesn’t matter how many people you follow as you’re not paying attention to your dashboard anyways.

But for those of us who want to make contacts through Twitter, who you decide to follow is incredibly important and it will be a major factor on your whole Twitter experience.

If you find Twitter becoming less useful because you are getting lots of updates from people you don’t know that well, unfollowing could be an option. Remember, you have the power to decide who you follow on Twitter

Last month I spoke about how Auto Replies Are Ruining The Direct Message System, something which I still believe. I rarely check my direct messages box because I get so many auto generated messages however many other people do use it frequently.

This was reminded to me the other week when a blogger who writes for me sent me a message through the Twitter DM system to tell me that her computer was playing up and her post might be a day late. Luck would have it that I happened to check my direct messages that day though it was something I hadn’t checked in weeks. So clearly I need to keep tabs on my messages just incase I get some legitimate mail.

So I’m a little curious, how often do you check your direct messages on Twitter?

Please take the time to vote in the poll below as I think the results will be interesting

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The last few weeks I have been thinking a lot about what I am looking to achieve through Twitter, particularly with my personal account @Kevin Muldoon. Although I have been signed up to Twitter for a year or so, I’ve only really become active on it in the last few months. During this time I have learned a lot and my Twittering habits have changed a little, as have the type of people I want to follow.

Before I go on I would just like to say that I don’t think there is a right or wrong way to use Twitter. Sure, spamming people isn’t smart and neither is posting several updates every few seconds as this type of thing will both annoy people and probably make them unfollow you too. However, generally speaking, I think that how you use Twitter is (or should be) about what you want to get from it. In that respect, it doesn’t matter if you have 500 followers or 50,000 or if you only follow 10 people or follow 100,000. If it works for you then keep doing what you’re doing.

Remember, you have the power to control who you follow so the number of updates you receieve is entirely up to you.

My Situation

I retiterate that I believe that how you use Twitter depends on what you are looking to achieve with it. So to better understand my view I think it’s best to explain what I am looking for with my accounts

I currently have 6 active Twitter accounts : My personal account plus 5 additional accounts which I use to give updates to blogs I run (for example, @Time_To_Tweet ). Most of the replies of these ‘Newsbot’ accounts are automated (with links to new blog posts) though I do check them frequently for @replies to make sure I respond to readers comments and questions.

Therefore with these accounts I am trying to :

• Connect with readers of my blogs and get to know them better
• Promote my blog posts to as many people as possible

In order to promote my blog posts to as many people as possible I am adhering to the ‘Follow To Get More Followers’ rule of thumb. This is the best solution for my ‘news’ accounts because I don’t have time to actively check them all the time anyways so I just check for @replies.

I have tried to follow people who are interested in the blog or forum I am promoting so that tweets are more targeted however I am aware that many people who are following my ‘Newsbot’ Twitter accounts back do not check their account often and are probably using Twitter in the same way as me. However, there will still be a large % of those people will be interested in the article in question and the hope is that they will read the article and perhaps comment on it , and perhaps retweet the post to their followers as well.

So to put it simply, the more followers these Twitter accounts have, the more people will be notified about the latest posts at my blogs. It is, in effect, a numbers game.

I won’t put up a huge argument with those of you who think this is a spammy way to promote a site through Twitter because in many respects it is. However it remains to be effective and the best way that I know of to promote a blog through Twitter.

This is not what I am trying to achieve with my personal account.

What I am looking to achieve with my personal Twitter account

My twitter habits are completely different with my personal Twitter account. With my personal account my primary aim is to build relationships with other users though just like everyone else, I like to shoot the breeze and tweet about any random thought I have in my head at the time.

I do not have any follow or follower strategy with my personal account. At the time of writing this I am following just over 1,000 users and have just under 1,400 followers. My ‘newsbot’ Twitter accounts have only bene live for about a month or so and follow over twice as many people which illustrates that with my personal account, it is not a numbers game. Infact, far from it.

I really dont care if I have 100 followers or 10,000, so long as I get what I want out of Twitter. The problem is, I’m not.

You see, up until now I have been happy to follow anyone who followed me back so long as they weren’t posting promotional links all the time, replied to other users regularly or posted about a topic I had a little interest in.

Compared to other Twitter users, following 1,000 people doesn’t sound like a lot. However, it is making it very difficult for me to build relationships with the people I want to connect with because my Twitter dashboard is full 95% of the time with tweets from people I don’t even know. Which means that I am not always seeing updates from the people I want to see and in turn, I am not replying to their tweets.

Clearly, if I am not getting what I want out of Twitter, I need to change my Twitter habits.

Why Seth Simonds Unfollowed 45,000 People On Twitter

3 days ago Seth Simonds wrote a post entitled ‘Why I Unfollowed 45,000 People On Twitter‘. Is you can imagine, the post got a lot of attention. I encourage you all to read the post before proceeding

Seth touched upon a lot of things which really hit home with me and made me realise that up until now, I had been doing this ‘Twitter’ thing all wrong. Wrong from the point of view that I was doing what I thought I should be doing rather than what I want to be doing.

So seth unfollowed the people who posted offers all the time, unfollowed the people who only followed him because he followed them back and said goodbye to those who unfollow him if he doesn’t follow him back (something which I have been guilty of in the past!).

He is currently only following about 264 people, which is a huge drop after following 45,000+ users. Some believe that this was a calculated move. Brett Borders from Social Media Rockstar starts off in his post ‘Why Passive-Aggressive Twitter Following Is Spam‘ with

A few weeks ago I mutually befriended a fellow blogger on Twitter, thinking that we had a lot in common… but yesterday I woke up and discovered that I’d been wiped from his friends list. I felt slightly concerned that I’d somehow offended him, until I saw a blog post where he describes spamming 45,000 people for the sake of self-promotion. It’s worth reading, as an amazingly slick PR piece, where he paints baiting-and-switching people as a virtuous self-discovery process… and many of his fans applaud him for it.

I don’t know a lot about Seth so I can’t say if this was something he had planned along. But it really doesn’t matter to me as I agree with everything he says in his post, and I believe that by following suit and removing people I have no genuine interest in, my Twitter experience will be better.

Doing this ‘Twitter’ thing right

I guess that, like a lot of other users, I haven’t wanted to be rude to people who are nice to me. So I have followed people who retweeted my links or replied to me wishing me the best of luck, even though I have no interest in what they do for a living or have any interest in their hobbies.

Is it really that bad if someone doesn’t follow you back? Isn’t using a script like TweetDeck to only see your favourites just a sneaky way of only seeing updates from your ‘real’ friends. Seth said it better than I could in his post :

Goodbye to those who follow everybody back but use 3rd party systems like Tweetdeck to “filter out” the people they don’t really want to see. I’m not interested in being a placeholder for you anymore. Why not publicly own up about who you find valuable? Do that and we won’t even need #followfriday anymore! All I’ll have to do is check out the people you’re following to see who you endorse. Isn’t that a cool idea?

Last month I asked whether Twiter was a one way street and suggested that celebrities were not getting enough from Twitter because they were not following many people back. I pointed out that a big part of Twitter is interacting with new people, which I still believe is true. Though now I realise you don’t need to follow everyone who follows you back to interact with people through Twitter.

The problem I see in my current situation is that I am following a lot of people who I don’t know. I don’t know them professionally or personally. They might have retweeted a post by me months ago and I followed them because of it but if it wasn’t for Twitter telling me that I was following them, I probably wouldn’t know if I had viewed their account before at all.

The same goes with my followers. How many of my followers know who I am or know what I do on the web? Well, I would say very few in comparison to the number of followers I have.

Today I checked through all my @replies to see who I have been connecting with in the last 2 months. Out of the 1,369 followers I currently have I have had around 100 short conversations with other users. Which is crazy when you consider I am following over a thousand!!

Changing my following policy

I have decided to change my following habits on Twitter in the hope that my Twitter experience improves through my personal account. This means that I will be unfollowing a lot of people.

After going through all my previous @replies and messages I have chosen the people that I am going to continue to follow. I was surprised to see that the total only reached 59 though I am sure that this number will rise over the next few months.

The people I am following have completely different follow and follower habits. Some have hundreds of thousands of subscribers, some follow everyone who follows them back and some follow less than ten. Nevertheless, I am going to continue to follow them for a variety of reasons.

• News Bots : These users tell me about the latest articles on their sites. Users like @techcrunch (Michael Arrington), @Mashable (Pete Cashmore), @trustedreviews and @HotUKDeals.
• Bloggers I Work With : People who I work with every week through my blogs (many of them write for my blogs). Including @SarahG, @PlagiarismToday and @PattiStafford.
• Real Life Friends : Friends I know in real life. For example, @mikesgolfblog.
• Twitter Friends : People I have connected with on Twitter or through my blogs/forums like @EzyBlogger and @Mintblogger.
• Blog Associates : Friends I have made through my blog like @5FtHighMktgGuy, @gypsybandito and @natewhitehill .

I know 100% of the people I am following, either through working with them, through knowing their websites or from establishing a relationship with them via Twitter or my blog. And about 95% know me very well too (Pete Cashmore and Michael Arrington have no idea who I am but I want to keep viewing their updates.).

To those I have unfollowed, please don’t take it personally, it was nothing you did or said via Twitter, I am simply trying to get more from this medium and make Twitter more manageable for me. If you would still like to view my tweets then please follow me but if not, feel free to unfollow me. Don’t worry, I won’t be offended

Even though I am now only following 59 people just now, I am sure that this will grow to 3 digits within the next month or so. However, I still want to keep my twitter manageable and make sure that I only follow people I know or people that I have connected with. The days of following someone back out of politeness are over!

Will I get more from Twitter by adapting this policy? I hope I do but only time will tell