You Are So Unfollowed

For the past couple of years, my Twitter follower/following ratio was always about 1:1.

Before I started to write this post I had about 9,000 followers.. and I was following roughly the same amount of people.

A lot of this following was due to the fact that I had auto-follow turned on for at least 2 years. So whenever someone followed me I would automatically follow them back.

This also rang true with all those automated bots whose aim is to get as many followers as possible. Whenever one of those would follow me, I would automatically follow back.

After a while my Twitter stream became more and more polluted.

It would have been about a year ago when things really started to feel different..

Every time I went on Twitter it felt as though I was in a big room with thousands of other people all shouting very loudly – all at the same time.

Not to mention all the direct message spam and automated bots.. and all those accounts re-hashing Mashable’s and Techcrunch’s content using Twitterfeed.

I was becoming more and more frustrated and wanted to get some control and order back.

I wanted no spam, less shouting and more talking.

Less broadcasting and more engaging.

So taking a lead from Robert Scoble (who famously unfollowed 106,000 people in a single day).. I also decided to unfollow EVERYONE.

How I Did It

Since Twitter changed the rules around mass unfollowing people, I couldn’t find a way to unfollow everyone in a single sweep.

I even asked @support but didn’t hear back from them.

There are many unfollow tools out there but the tool I used to unfollow everyone was ManageFlitter.

ManageFlitter is a very simple to use tool with a clean interface, enabling you to easily unfollow people based on a variety of different factors.

Twitter only allows you to unfollow 1,000 people in a 24 hours period.. so every day for about a week I unfollowed as many people as I could until I wasn’t following anyone.

I think Twitter was out by two.. as it said I was following 2 people (although no-one displayed).. and it also said You aren’t following anyone yet,

I finally had a clean slate again.

And no more spam!

Within a few days the number of people following me dropped by about 300.. these were probably automated accounts.

For the first time in a long time, Twitter has become enjoyable again.

Moving Forward

This time around I think I will try to keep the amount of people I follow to a more manageable number.. maybe a hundred to two.

And definitely start to use lists more.

To get the ball rolling again I started to follow some top pro-bloggers and established social media gurus.

If you were one of the people I unfollowed please let me know and I will follow you back, or add you to a VIP list.

Would you do it?

Robert Scoble’s thread – New Twitter Movement: Unfollow Everyone – on FriendFeed has a good discussion on whether this is a good thing or not.. check it out.
Would you unfollow everyone and start again from scratch if your Twitter stream got out of control?