Having been running the social media platform for ChurchMag and making the decision to unfollow most everyone on Twitter, I have come up with a huge number of reasons to unfollow someone.
Why? Because you don’t need to waste your time, so be liberal with unfollowing and strict with who you do follow.
(Do note, I have some fun with this.)
- You are a bot, share something offensive, or just share stuff I’m not into. I’m going to unfollow you.
- If someone on social media loves to follow and then unfollow you or others if you don’t follow back, you need to unfollow that person.
- If someone is saying you need to sign up for an untested service to improve your specific reach, even though the service has only been out for months and evolving and willing to set you up for failure, you need to unfollow that person.
- If someone loves to share “the best stories of the day” or simply a link to their Facebook or Google+ account as more than 25% of their regular posts, you need to unfollow that person.
- If the person tweets once a month or 75 times a day with a lot of noise and therefore taking away a lot of visibility to people you want to watch, you need to unfollow that person.
- You follow a million people, just because they followed you. Doesn’t sound very social to me.
- If someone loves to self-promote ALL THE TIME, to the point that it feels like spam, you need to unfollow that person.
- If someone is too offensive, takes things too personally, or just loves to get into numerous Twitter storms that dominate your feed, you need to unfollow that person.
- You are an Apple or Android fan boy to a serious fault. Nobody needs that.
- If someone loves to send out automated DMs, you need to unfollow that person.
- If someone overuses their hashtags, you need to unfollow that person.
- If someone is too repetitive, sending the same tweets numerous times a week “because its Twitter and I can get away with it,” you need to unfollow that person.
- You do not present yourself as a real person or organization (i.e. the egg profile picture, no biography, and using fake information)
Blessing Mpofu says
I struggle with people who barely tweet. In my book no one can tweet too much… I don’t tweet as much as I used to but I can’t stand non-tweeters.
So, tweeting too little or not at all, is one of the biggest reasons I sometimes unfollow…
Jeremy Smith says
Ditto. I want to follow you to hear what you have to say?
Jared M says
I’m the opposite. In my opinion, don’t tweet unless you have something to say. Too many people are constantly posting things just for the sake of it. I’d rather follow someone who only tweets occasionally, but always says something great, than the person who tweets drivel constantly. I suppose there are the few who tweet great things all the time, but I’d say they are few and far between.
Jeremy Smith says
Agreed, it is definitely a balance and for those that can not only tweet abundantly and consistently, but also tweet something that is refined and adding something to the overall conversation, then you really are on your way to success on the platform. That being said, this does not give you license to abandon your account as many have done.
Jared M says
Stop looking at me when you say that…
Priscilla King says
Despite my online identity being a registered business as distinct from a real-world person, I’m real all right. (And unique. And online…not every single day, but after avoiding Twitter because I didn’t think it was my kind of thing for years, I’m finding it to be my kind of thing, more and more every day!)
I do recommend that people create screen identities if they’re going online more than once a year–stick to those identities, for clarity, but keep those identities completely separate from their real ones. Never put your real name, address, birthday, any information about money or children, on a computer that links to the Internet. I say this because I’ve been hacked several times, but because “Priscilla King” is strictly a cyberspace entity who doesn’t use any bank where any real person associated with “her” has more than a two-figure Paypal-only account, all the hackers have done was annoy me by “updating” my e-mail format. Others should arrange to be so lucky!