Yes ladies and gentlemen, nowadays being a “loner” and a wicked “unfollower” on this platform is key for those who want their timeline to be a better place on “Twitterland”. 🙂
It’s very common, in the desperate race for a shocking community on Twitter, to become serial followers…
In today’s article, we will see:
- why it’s important to know who’s following you and who has stopped
- because it’s relevant to get a good ratio of followers and
- how you can optimize your account in order to get them!
Sinners of the follow/ follow back
I believe there are still people who think being a serial follower is smart and they’re so obsessed with numbers that if they lose a follower this happens:
This practice of mass following is supported by the belief that the people who we follow will follow us back, which is partly true but only at a 30% approximately. If you are on Twitter you’ve probably seen this. Many apps were made specifically to offer “mass follow” services since it’s one of the easiest and simplest ways to look as if you have a “successful” profile but things have changed and being a “serial follower” isn’t only in but also it’s not smart since it leads us nowhere (good).
The seemingly “winning” attitude of a serial is as phony as this:
Today people seek good content, and for that, it’s necessary to have a timeline where you can find that easily, instead of having to go over an endless scroll until you find what interests you.
Michael Hyatt or Chris Brogan are two examples of really successful people within the social media world that decided many years ago to start the habit of cleaning Twitter and promoting quality over quantity. Hyatt did a “mass unfollow” and cleared his account eliminating over 105K people and his results were excellent: he was able to make out of Twitter a real social environment in which he has real and quality interactions with the people he has kept.
What type of user are you? – Twitter´s Golden Ratio
There’s a saying that goes: “less is more” which I think adjusts perfectly to Twitter’s new spirit. I relate to the fear of many people that clearing their accounts would mean to end up like Milhouse 🙂 …
Twitter is as simple as that, and since the new habit “quality > quantity ” has been encouraged Twitter’s “follower’s ratio” became an important indicator of real “success” in this platform. Basically it lets us know what type of user you are:
In order to calculate the ratio you only need to divide the number of people following you “F” by the number of people, you follow “f”.
F/f = ratio
If the result is more than 1 you have a quite optimized profile, you are popular and interesting. Your timeline is clean and you are not exposed to Tweet pollution.
I’ll share with you some examples that will help you forget about being shy or insecure to start deleting from once and for all:
The negative consequences of being a serial follower.
Besides ruining your ratio which will lead many people to decide against following you, there are other reasons that will impact you and your account directly in a negative way unless you decide to revert your behavior:
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- If you follow people that have nothing to do with what you do, Twitter doesn’t quite get your profile and doesn’t know who to suggest (or suggests the wrong people).
- Your timeline is chaotic and you never find relevant content or information.
- The quality of your community is low.
- Since you don’t have quality followers and they’re not related to your interests what you upload to your timeline isn’t retweeted or hit as favorite.
- Your inbox is filled with spam and so is your timeline.
- If you want your message, product or cause to sell you’ll find it difficult since you are not addressing the right people.
- You don’t have the chance to check if your social media strategy brings about good results or if it doesn’t. What you say or do goes unnoticed.
- If you happen to be praised a lot you can’t manage to read all the mentions or to answer all the messages and you start to lose control of your profile and fail to interact with people that are truly valuable for you.
- It ceased to be a social platform, good communication vanished.
- You’ll realize Twitter isn’t interesting any longer and that it doesn’t optimize your life.
Who stopped following me and who isn’t following me on Twitter?
Why is that question necessary? The answers to these questions benefit us in two ways:
1- They work as a kickoff to investigate who we’ll remove from our timeline, who’s worth keeping and who isn’t, such as:
- Inactive profiles
- Profiles that have never retweeted us
- Fake profiles
- Profiles that don’t follow us back
- Profiles that have nothing to do with our interests
- Profiles that fail to provide information we can later share
- Profiles that wouldn’t work as future subscribers, customers or readers
In order to organize this process better, we suggest the following: first make a list on Twitter where you include the people you do want to keep so you won’t lose anyone important in the clean up. You can do so following these instructions.
2- Knowing who has stopped following us or who never did makes us formulate or reformulate, our account is clean, a social media strategy that’s effective so you can attract the right people and reinforce engagement with those you do want to have on your Twitter.
With a small community and having your audience defined we can identify more easily what people haven’t followed us, analyze who they do follow, what content they share, what are their interests, what the competition does to keep those followers and then we can design a plan to optimize our presence on this social network and make the most of it.
Even if you only use the platform to get information, a clean up, will let you get to that relevant tweet, you know, the one that’s useful and contributes to something good to our timeline.
It is good to remember then that part of this process isn’t only eliminating people but also knowing who to follow.
To do that you can use these tools, that will help with choose more wisely who should be part of your community, via suggestions of profiles by relevance, popularity, authority and influence within your niche of interest:
Who unfollowed me on Twitter: How do I quickly clean up my Twitter account?
Well, now that you already know the theory and understand why you need to clear your account here’s a list of tools so you can do your clean up as simple, easy and free as possible.
One of the most complete and popular ones is the previously mentioned: Crowdfire. It has a complete board that allows you to monitor your profile and the activity of your followers in a simple way.
The free version is quite basic but the paid options are much more complete. And, you can administer and check several accounts!
Conclusión
Twitter reality has changed. Quantity is no longer important, except if you are a rock star. But in our cases, very different to that one, it’s necessary to do an honest clean up of both:
- our follower base and
- who we follow.
So, we can pay attention to the people that really want to communicate with us. And we can access relevant information, that’s helpful in our daily lives:
- checking if your strategies really work and
- so you can work on them based on a real audience.
For those of you who want to clear your account, and optimize your profile, take a look at this article: Why does no one follow you on Twitter?
Have you cleared an account before? Did it work?
Leave us your comments!