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Why It Pays To Purge – When and How to Unfollow

Posted: 10 Dec 2009 06:03 AM PST

As much as many of us like to think that we’re highly organized and efficient when it comes to our use of Twitter, there is in fact a lot we can do to make our lives easier.

In the last couple of weeks I’ve adopted some fairly radical measures to streamline and improve my use of Twitter, which I’ll share with you here.

1 – Cut the Number of People You Follow

The temptation when you first start using Twitter is to embark on a ‘follow rampage’. You add the news sites you read, the bloggers you respect, friends, family, colleagues, business contacts and in turn many of the people that follow or are followed by these accounts.

This seems like a great idea at first, but you find you soon reach a tipping point – in my own case, by following close to 2000 people, Twitter had become nothing more than a never-ending deluge of noise, with useful and informative Tweets getting lost amongst the junk. Even by setting up user lists in Seesmic Desktop (the desktop app I use), I was finding it ever harder to keep up.

A couple of weeks back I made the decision to cut back on who I followed. It was time to ‘purge’.

Before hitting the unfollow option in earnest, I realised it would be a wise idea to set myself some criteria for who I should keep:

– Is the person I’m following bringing any real value to me? The million dollar question. It’s very easy to follow someone just because everyone else is, or because you they have a job that gives the assumption that their tweets will be useful. Often this couldn’t be further from the truth.

– Is the person I’m following tweeting unique information and links or are they mainly retweeting stuff I’m already getting from other sources?

– Does the person I’m following follow me and if they do, do they ever communicate with me or retweet what I put out there?

I’m sure there’s plenty of further criteria of your own that you could add, but this is what suited me personally.

Next, I realised that as I was currently following so many people, it would take me many hours to go through everyone using Twitter on its own. Thankfully there’s some great tools available to help you. I used Your Twitter Karma, so I’ll describe the process I went through in using this tool specifically.

When you log in to Your Twitter Karma (be patient – it can take a few minutes to load your details) you’re presented with a huge list of Twitter users. Under each itemised Twitter account it tells you whether you follow that person, whether they follow you, or whether you both follow each other. Clicking on the avatar brings up that person’s Twitter profile, so you can refresh your memory as to who they are, what they do, and whether their tweets are of value to you.

Next comes the evil part! The purge . . .

Select the users that you wish to stop following, by clicking the checkbox next to their avatar. This can be quite a time-consuming process, but it’s well worth it in the long run. When you’ve selected everyone you want to unfollow, click the ‘bulk unfollow’ button at the bottom of the page.

All done! Now check your Twitter profile to check that your follow count has dropped to what you expect. Be prepared that your follower count may also drop slightly, as some people use auto-follow / auto-unfollow tools that will drop you if you drop them.

2 – Effectively Manage the Remaining People You Follow

In my case, once I’d purged my account I was left with around 200 people I was still following – a drop of over 2000! In return about 200 people stopped following me.

Once I’d got over what I’d done, it was time to effectively manage who I was left with.

This next step is very easy to undertake. Most desktop Twitter applications (such as Seesmic Desktop and TweetDeck) allow you to set up usergroups, whereby you can classify the people you follow into distinct groups, such as ‘friends’, ‘colleagues’, ‘business’, ‘celebrities’ etc. In future when you get a new tweet for someone you have allocated to a group it will appear in the appropriate group column. This way you can find and read it with far less difficulty.

Twitter now also allows you to set up lists as well, so you can group together people in a similar way.

3 – Be Prepared to Fall in Love With Twitter All Over Again

I know that what I’ve described sound quite radical, but believe me, if Twitter has become an out of control stream of tweets that you can’t keep up with, it really is your only option.

Now i’ve drastically cut the number of people i follow down to the bare bones, I’ve rediscovered my love for this great tool.

Additionally, whereas before I wouldn’t have dreamed of using Twitter on my iPhone, now I can login to the likes of Tweetie and thumb my way through tweet after tweet of valuable information (and the odd piece of celebrity gossip!).

The value is back!

Please note: Undertake the steps I’ve outlined at your own risk. I can not be held responsible for anything that may happen to your Twitter account as a result of following what you read here. Also be warned that it is not advisable to bulk-unfollow Twitter accounts then bulk-follow new accounts, as Twitter may deem you to be mis-using their service and suspend your account without notice.

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