10 Ways To Get UnFollowed On Twitter

I try to spend 30 minutes a week doing a little housekeeping with my various blogs and social media accounts.

Whether it’s simply tightening up profile bios, updating links or completely deleting accounts, maintaining an online presence for business purposes is mostly tedious boring work.

Well, until today….

Quick background – I’ve started to spend a little more time on my personal Twitter acct actually paying attention to people vs only sharing my favorite links of the day.

Generally, I’ll spend most of my time in Google Reader browsing about 50 or so articles a day and simply clicking “share” to have a few relevant links syndicated out through Dlvr.it to targeted Twitter or FB Business Pages.

However, now that I’m physically logging in to Twitter direct or through Hootsuite, I decided it was time to cut the list of people I follow down to a more manageable number.

While there are probably more efficient ways of reducing the noise by using an “UnFollow” Twitter application, I figured I’d spend a quick 30 min. scrolling through everyone I follow to see if there were any obvious profiles that I could delete based on name, photo or bio.

Not sure exactly what I was looking for, but I thought it would at least give me an opportunity to see some old faces as I scrolled through a few years of Twitter memories.

So, here are the top 10 reasons I deleted someone from my “follow” list on Twitter:

1. No Photo –

Unless I knew who they were, it didn’t make sense to follow someone who was too lazy to upload some sort of profile photo.

2. No Bio –

Really? I think that mastering the art of the one sentence bio should be the first thing people focus on before they worry about trying to “dominate the web” with all of the new secret magic bullet SEO strategies that are being taught by the Gurus.

Of course, I made a couple of exceptions.

I’m sure I’ve got some hidden bios online that suck, but I think I’ve always tried to at least mention my city, industry and intentions.

3. Quote For A Bio –

I get it, Twitter is a form of self-expression for some people. Cool.

However, I was searching for “Real Estate” or “Mortgage” terms in bios from people that I didn’t recognize for my first run so that I could at least follow industry related tweets.

So, since a nifty quote didn’t tell me much about the person at quick glance, I unfollowed them. Sorry.

4. “Guru” In Bio –

That’s just funny.

5. “I Help People Make Money With Social Networking” In Bio –

Trying to avoid the spam as much as possible.

6. Multiple Websites In Bio –

Call me crazy, but I’d rather know who someone is before I click their link.

7. “I Tweet For ___, ___ and ___” In Bio –

There is a difference between multiple people tweeting for a brand or company, but I don’t understand how one person can jump in and out of other personalities.

8. Locked Accounts –

I guess, if someone’s hiding their tweets…. I don’t know.

9.  Obvious Bots / Re-Tweeters –

I’m sure there are some good exceptions to this rule, but I’ll save the auto-tweet engines for a list or Google Reader feed.

10.  Brands / Companies –

I took a second look at all brands and companies to make sure there was a real person managing their Twitter feeds.

I actually kept most of them, but the few industry names that simply follow every agent or loan officer are probably better for a list or something… if I ever get to that point.

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My next step will be to casually monitor the actual updates as they start to flow through and just start unfollowing people that show a pattern of posting things that are useless to me.

I’m sure I’ll have another “Top 10” list once I get in and start examining people’s activity, links and number of followers / following ratios. But, we’ll save that for another post.

Maybe one day I can figure out how to apply Twitter more effectively to my listings on a separate feed for our new Las Vegas Real Estate company, or even use some of the tools to make my time more efficient.

But for now, I’m content approaching each connection on Twitter one at a time as thought there are real people who have something to say that might benefit me in 140 characters or less.

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