Twitter Nuke
It’s official – I’ve finally nuked my Twitter following. A month ago, I made a goal to bring down the Twitter following from 9,744 down to a hundred or so.
As it stands, it is now down to 190 following. I’m expecting the followers to drop after a while. After all, if it was reciprocal following that got them in the first place, nothing wrong with reciprocal unfollowing.
What’s interesting, however, is the number of lists I’m now on has increased.
A list is what other people “label” you as. So, you can get a good idea of what someone is focused on by checking out their lists.
Back when Twitter first came out, I signed up but did nothing with the account. After which, I bought an info-product which taught me how to increase my followers.
Increase it I did – I got interviewed and my name even appeared on the local papers as Singapore’s Top 5 Twitter Users.
Later, the secret “how to do it” was out – people started massive reciprocal followings.
(One fellow Singaporean decided to snub me by tweeting “Hey, I just overtook you in followers. It was easy.” I couldn’t snub him back because Twitter decided he was doing something funky and suspended his 60k followers account.)
As I spent more time on Twitter, I found it hard to build relationships with the people I wanted to connect to. It was like trying to have a decent conversation in a
That was when I decided to do a mass unfollowing… what I call the
After the
I could no longer hear all the inane cacophony of senseless tweets. Whoever survived the nuke, they instantly became closer. I could hear them now.
As for the tools I used, most of them don’t work now. Twitter did not allow bulk unfollowing. I did, however, use UnTweeps – this allowed me to unfollow some of the dead/stale Twitter users. Unfortunately, the application hung on me often as I had too many to unfollow.
I ended up having to manually unfollow Twitter users. Which was, in a sense, paying my dues.
Let me say this upfront: I’m not doing this to get attention. This isn’t anything new and this post is more like “refer to my blog” if people want to know (or even care) why I changed my Twitter following/followers strategy.
There are other ways to increase Twitter followers and make money using Twitter – I believe it all boils down to creating real followers.
By using articles, videos, podcasts, list building, etc to build a real, natural following instead of hollow reciprocal followers.