Two weeks ago I did something crazy. I decided that I was unhappy with what was happening on Twitter and how we were using it. So I used a service to help me automatically unfollow everyone we followed at @seventy8prod as well as force unfollowed 5,000 spam accounts that were following us. Is it bad from a marketing perspective? Yep. But I am excited that I did it, but as the tweet below explains, I probably should explain why I did it.
@seventy8prod or more like 20,000 what's the strategy behind that? Blog coming?
— Todd Lowans (@ToddLowans) May 16, 2014
The Old Strategy
I preach constantly to church tech people that you need to have a primary and secondary social media presence. For us, Google+ is definitely primary and Twitter has been secondary for a long time. I do recognize that Twitter is the best traffic we get for the blog, but Google+ has consistently offered better relational connections with people. So that is how I used the two platforms: Twitter was our RSS feed machine where we simply tweeted out links and occasionally a nugget of wisdom and Google+ is where I went to connect with people.
What this meant was that I wanted to followback everyone that was following me, hence why we had 33,000+ followers before I took dramatic actions. I know how to network and at the time, I was simply wanting to build up my followers as high as I could go. This might be good if all I cared about was selling stuff, but I have told you guys over and over that I want to be relational online and don’t care about traffic or selling stuff. Unfortunately this caused four different problems for me:
- I didn’t know 98% of the people I was following.
- I was getting 10 DMs a day of spam, viruses, or people asking for me to retweet them.
- I was following some highly inappropriate accounts for being a Christian organization.
- I didn’t feel like I could block or unfollow someone
Start Fresh
So I have taken swift action and hope that this new phase means that I will begin to better engage with people. I have already been interacting with people I never knew were so cool, all because the clutter was gone.
This strategy is still new, so I have a lot of following still to do. If you are reading this and I have not followed you back yet, yell at me on here or on Twitter and I will fix that.
This is not the end of this conversation, but I want to get a month into this experience before I comment more about it, so look for a follow up article soon.
I want to hear from you, what do you think about unfollowing most of those you follow and only following those you truly care about or those that authentically interact with you?
Michael Beil says
good move.
seventy8Productions says
Agreed!