In the past 24 hours, I have been running a reboot of my Twitter account. I had about 1800 followers, and was following 1600 accounts myself. However, I’ve been finding my Twitter feed to be less and less valuable than it previously was.
I joined Twitter in the summer of 2007, after hearing so many good things about it from social media icon Chris Brogan. I started following him, along with other people in and out of New York, as well as the people they were following. It was fun. I was connecting with people.
Then I got to the point where I was following 2000 people. I couldn’t follow anyone else, and realized that there were many people I was not getting value from. I would slowly remove people, using services like Friend or Follow to find the people I was following who weren’t following me back.
This wasn’t enough. Still too much noise. One problem was that many of these people were following me back. Do I risk losing followers, or is there something better: Can I replace the tweets I’m skipping with ones that would be more valuable, even if it means that I have fewer followers.
On Sunday, I unfollowed everybody. At the time of this writing, I have 1690 followers, about 115 fewer than I had yesterday. I am now following only 36 people. I invite you to tell me why I should follow you, whether I did in the past or not, and shall give you a try!
You are also invited to follow me at @coffeewithian
