The Great Twitter Purge of 2011, Or Why I Have Decided To Unfollow Everyone & Start Over | North Salem Homes for Sale

The time has finally come.  I think I always knew that I’d have to do some sort of Twitter house cleaning, but based on my last blog post, and some folks like Michael Hyatt and the mighty Chris Brogan who have pioneered by braving the backlash, I think I’m ready for a purge myself.  So starting today, I begin unfollowing everyone on Twitter with the help of SocialOomph.

Up to this point, I’ve subscribed to the reciprocal follow approach.  You follow me?  Well then I follow you.  Why not?  I’ve always used lists to curate my Twitter information, so the size of my following wasn’t all that much of a concern of mine.  Over the years it’s allowed me to grow a sizeable Twitter audience.  But at what expense?

Because of this approach, DM usage is out of the question.  I’m sure I probably lose legitimate messages sent to me because they are buried in spam.  It also pretty much makes Twitter a broadcast channel for me and not much of an engagement channel.  Certainly I’ve benefited in this in driving a decent amount of traffic to my blog, but honestly, I long for being able to actually use Twitter more to engage with folks which currently is much harder to do.

Of course I’m taking some steps to ensure I can follow back the folks I currently wish to stay connected with by creating lists of these users of which I will follow back after the purge.  I’m sure I will get my fair share of real folks that either unfollow me back automatically or manually.  And really, if they were only following me for the follow, that’s not much of a loss.

However I’m sure I will unknowingly unfollow quite a few folks that I would prefer to follow so if you are a casualty of my Twitter purge, please reach out before writing me off completely.

And so it begins.  More to come as I blog about the after effects and how my usage of Twitter evolves after the change.

Jason Yormark Author Profile | Follow on Twitter | Facebook

This article originally appeared on jasonyormark.com and has been republished with permission.

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