Why I Unfollowed You
Try these strategies to lose followers and waste your time on Twitter.
1) Have no name, photo, bio, or website.
Avoid looking like a real person at all, in fact. If you arbitrarily capitalize and ignore the 140 character limit, you can look even more like a robot.
These are at the top of your profile. The only things I know about you are your profile info and your last 20 tweets (last 4 or 5 if you don’t convince me to scroll down). That’s not much time to grab my attention and sell yourself to me. Don’t waste that precious “above the fold” space.
2) Follow 3,000 people before you bother updating.
This goes back to number 1. Bot-like behavior is definitely appreciated. It’s even better if you follow completely disparate people, like you just grabbed all the users off the public timeline for an hour.
If you have no followers and no updates, there’s no compelling reason to think you actually listen to any of those followers. When you follow thousands of people, you’re devaluing every one of them. Yeah, there are some broadcasters who make a point to follow most of their followers, but getting @chrisbrogan’s attention is nearly impossible.
3) Never reply to or retweet anyone.
Make a point to ignore everyone you follow, especially if you follow thousands of people (see #2). If people think you’re listening to them, it gives them power over you.
If you think of Twitter as a one-way medium, you’re missing out. Interact with people and have conversations, or you’re slightly less interesting than a radio DJ. At least they take requests sometimes. Yeah there are broadcasters, @nytimes comes to mind, but if you think you’re the New York Times, you’re too delusional for me to care, anyway.
If you’re lucky, I’ll see 7 or 8 posts at the top of your profile. If none of those are replies, you might as well not not have any. Keep the dialog going.
4) Include Your URL in Every Tweet.
The two best uses of Twitter are to promote your own stuff and to drive up your Google rankings. Make sure every tweet has a link to you!
I will unfollow with extreme prejudice if I think your only goal is to drive people to your site. Twitter is not push marketing. Twitter is a community and a network. I will not visit your site, and Twitter puts rel="nofollow" on links. It’s a waste of time and its annoying.
Don’t share the same link over and over, don’t only link your blog, and don’t link yourself constantly. Do share good, new content, whether it’s yours or not.
5) Definitely Be Inconsistent.
Don’t post anything for two weeks, then dump seven or eight tweets in the space of an hour. It’s your job to keep your followers on their toes.
Whether I’m following you for fun (@dr_crane) or for information (@mashable) resist the urges flood and to go dark. Don’t be afraid to go to that meeting, take that long weekend away from the computer, or whatever it is that you do, but please don’t fill my entire stream when you come back. You really should keep some of those little tidbits in your head.
If you honestly discover 6 great things in 10 minutes, and want to share them all, then go for it. I’ll thank you. Short of that, try to rate-limit yourself.
That’s why I unfollowed you.
Why would you unfollow somone?
Update: #6. You sent an automated Direct Message after I followed you.
If I want bots, I’ll follow @nytimes. I don’t really care if it’s a “thank you” or a pitch: bots are annoying. Chris Brogan is right.
Your #1 reason is one that I find most frustrating. If someone hasn’t taken the time to fill out their profile, they are making it extremely difficult for others to determine what they are all about. It only takes a few moments to add your website URL to the Twitter profile. Just. do. it.
There’s a limited amount of “above the scroll” information, and the only part that’s consistent is the profile.
Don’t waste it.
I agree with all these points except #3. I unfollowed people because they were constantly replying, and pushing virtually no content tweets. I had no idea what they were talking about as most of the times I didn’t follow the person they were replying too. And frankly, it’s boring to dig through the ping-pong of replies, and they are often meaningless. So I stopped after trying once or twice.
When I see many @s in the timeline, I hesitate to follow too.
I’ve never understood the complaint of getting half the conversation. The default setting is to only show you replies if you follow the person getting the reply. If yours is different, you can turn those off. (Settings > Notifications)
A little less than half my tweets are replies–comments, answers–according to TweetStats. I share things and produce some content (like this blog) but I’m mainly a consumer.
If you only want to follow broadcasters, you might be getting nearly 100% original content tweets, but you’ll lose a lot of the value generated by the community. Following replies has led me to new people to follow and helped me build relationships. Personally, I’d rather follow someone who only replies than someone who only posts “content.”
Hmm, good point. Maybe I am looking at Twitter too much like an instant RSS feed, rather than a new kind of IRC. But I’d really put a doubt in ‘value generated by the community’ coming from the @replies going back and forth – because how much % of that is really ‘value’?
Listening to two other people talk may not have value to you, so ignore it. The beauty of ambient information is you don’t need to read everything. But if you only follow broadcasters, you’d lose the ability to say “Hey, does anyone know…?” and get a response.
With my little network, I can ask help from Flash experts, Linux experts, graphic designers, other developers, teachers, dads… and get a response. That’s the value of the community, and to me it’s worth more than the original content.
When I think of it, you are kind of right, but I’ve never tried to make Twitter something like a personal ask.com – but on the other hand it makes sense.
The way I see it may be a bit offset by the way I use Twitter – I’ve setup a link from Twitter to my GTalk with http://www.tweet.im and now I’m getting all update straight to Adium, like normal IM messages. So, what I’m interested in is getting some outside content, not going back to Twitter to read through @replies, because I want to minimize Twitter homepage necessity.
Then it stroke me people post a lot of rss-like content, inform about blog updates or new, interesting articles, and i get these way faster than through GReader. So I kind of shifted to making my followed list very content-rich. I can’t tell you this is a good approach, but I can’t agree with you that yours is the way to go, too
That isn’t to say I’ve given up on Google, far from it, but with more subjective things, or questions I don’t know how to ask, advice or opinions, Twitter lets me get answers from people instead of machines.
I use Twhirl (but might jump to Tweetdeck for my main account) and one of the best features is that I can let the window sink below all my other applications, so I can control the noise level. I almost never visit Twitter’s site.
I’m not going to promote a specific tool, but maybe something with more filters would be easier to manage than the firehose of instant messages.
There’s a good point – filtering the firehose of messages (instant, twitter, whatever). That’s why I am hesitant to follow someone who has a lot of @replies – it’s easier to flood with them, legitimately, than with content messages. And I not mean on purpose, it’s just the effect of normal behavior, which some referred to when coming up with “Twitter is not a chat” thing.
Maybe semantics would help to auto-filter content, but that’s a matter of years…