14 Ways To Get Unfollowed on Twitter

By Brian Carter on April 21, 2008 11:24 PM | | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)
 
I just went through a rash of unfollowing- I cut about 25% of you loose. 

I finally have been on twitter long enough (a week) and have enough followers (174) to not feel insecure about my number of followers. 

Initially, I followed a lot of you- I twubbled you because other cool people were following you.  But not all of you have worked out.  

I looked at my following list tonight and thought "who the heck are these people?" 

You once looked like you might be cool, you might have something to say, but you've remained anonymous and now you've been ejected from the brianstream.

Sorry, it's not you, it's me. Well, maybe it's you.  I noticed...

Some criteria that made me more likely to unfollow you-
If you want to stay followed by people, you might want to avoid these:
  1. you don't have a photo- ok I'm not unfollowing my CEO but he needs to get an image
  2. you have a weird photo
  3. you're ugly
  4. you look dirty.  just kidding.  no, seriously- dirt is bad.
  5. you have a dumb image, like maybe a spiderweb, instead of your face
  6. you look pretentious but don't back it up with cool tweets
  7. haven't heard you twitter in the last week
  8. you aren't following me
  9. your photo is of someone famous who's not you
  10. your twitter name includes 'show' or 'network' or 'news' or 'buzz' but you never tweet
  11. your twitter name includes 'affiliate'
  12. you're famous like henry rollins but never tweet
  13. you're a female and your photo makes you look like a porn star
  14. your name is brian.  there can only be one brian!  just kidding.

Clearly the biggest sin in twitter is never tweeting.  I've even kept some semi-annoying people who tweet.  I was tempted to remove some famous industry people who haven't been tweeting, like @pierre or @TheGrok just because they don't deserve to be followed because they haven't been tweeting.  Why isn't @randfish tweeting.  Geez!

Conversely, I'm more likely to keep you if
  1. you tweet and you're not annoying
  2. you look cool
  3. you look nice
  4. you're well known in my industry
  5. you tweet or post useful stuff
  6. you're following me.  I may have never heard from you and not even like how you look, but you're a keeper.  "you follow me! you really really follow me!"
  7. your name sounds familiar even if it's not
  8. cool nice people have been @replying you

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2 Comments

Roger Bauer said:

Brian,
I'm facing a similar dilemma. We've been on Twitter close to the same amount of time, and there are several people I'm following that are violating your list so I may follow your lead and trim a few folks. I don't have as many followers though so that insecurity must be nagging at me to hold off a bit longer. ;)

Good post.

Roger

April 21, 2008 11:52 PM
Todd Mintz said:

I guess I have the attitude that unless you're spamming me or you're totally annoying, it's not worth the trouble to unfollow people.

April 22, 2008 9:06 AM

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