Having a lot of followers isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. As of this writing, I currently have 45,735 followers on my Twitter account. I know, I know…being that popular sounds pretty awesome, but when it comes to brand management I’ve realized that quantity isn’t all that important—quality is.
Allow me to explain.
I used to think a lot differently back when I started my Twitter journey. Back then, I believed that you needed to have a large following to gain a lot of respect. I thought, “All of the most popular people/companies on Twitter have a huge following, so why shouldn’t I?”
So I started following tons of people every day. I tried targeting people in my niche to follow, figuring that they would like the content I had to offer.
I also made it an effort to follow back everyone who followed me. I thought that if they were decent enough to follow my tweets then I should reciprocate and be their “friend”. Fast forward a year and I have nearly 50,000 ‘tweeple’ on my Twitter list.
This brings me to my dilemma.
Spam. I haven’t looked up any data on the subject, but I wouldn’t be surprised if half of all Twitter accounts created are marketers/spammers. Since gaining my following, I haven’t been able to enjoy Twitter the way I would like to because my news feed is cluttered with garbage.
Because of this, I found that I’m using Twitter less than I used to. It’s hard to find all of the people I would like to converse with when my stream is constantly updating with adverts. I’ve never even used my Direct Message feature on Twitter because of all the spam.
What am I going to do about it?
I’ve decided to unfollow everyone. Over the next week or so I will be creating an Excel spreadsheet of all of the users I would like to follow—real people I can build relationships with. If you want to connect, simply send me an @reply and I will gladly follow you (if you aren’t a spammer!).
It will be interesting to see how many ‘people’ unfollow me after doing this. Any bots/machines that have a feature like that will unfollow me immediately, proving how many fake followers I had.
I’m going to organize all of my followers into lists. I will go over this in a future post because I think Twitter Lists is a great feature and could be very helpful if you’re looking to hold conversations with your followers like I am.
I’ll post the Excel spreadsheet as a shareable Google Doc once completed. Check back for that!
***UPDATE: The Excel spreadsheet idea didn’t pan out, but the list idea worked perfectly. You can read all about my Twitter Solution on the blog and follow my Twitter Lists***
Am I insane for doing this? What would you do in my situation? Have you had to put up with all of the Twitter spam? Let me know your thoughts in the comment section below!
Image Credit: svilen001