Yesterday I finished up a monumental task that has taken me a while and that task was to trim down the number of people I follow on Twitter. Actually, it was more like a clearcut!
At one point I had been following nearly 2,200 people and had about 2,350 followers. It was getting to the point that I couldn’t follow a lot of what was happening because I just had too many people in my feed. Managing through lists wasn’t even working.
Over a couple weeks I’ve worked on looking at every single follower and asking myself why I’m following them. In many cases people are no longer tweeting, their tweets are irrelevant to me now or I can’t remember why in the heck I was following them in the first place! I can remember when I followed some people though. It was certainly a trip back in time; more than three years actually!
I moved many of the online marketing, social media and SEO people to another Twitter account I have. They just made more sense to be followed from that account.
So, how low do you think my follower count is now? I had thought I’d keep it at about 1,500, but I was amazed when the total ended up at 865! Wow! It had to be done though. I feel much better about being able to manage less than 1,000 followers, let alone more than 2,000!
These are the first people I followed on Twitter just over three years ago and am still following.
I’m sure that count will grow again, but in the past few months I’ve already been quite selective about those I follow. One thing I will say is that the quality of people following me recently has increased. I’ve noticed a real decrease in spam followers lately. I don’t know if Twitter has finally been able to clamp down on garbage Twitter accounts but it’s nice to see that there seem to be a lot less of them.
I had written a post on information overload a while back. Never posted it. Got distracted. Story of my life these days. I’m hoping that pruning who I follow on Twitter will help to ease that information overload.
I’d be interested in hearing how you manage your Twitter account and if you’ve gone through the same process. How do you decide who you’ll follow and who you won’t? Any ideas on dealing with information overload?
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