Is Twitter Fickle?
As I got to the point of following almost 900 people on Twitter, my timeline was getting very, very noisy. So noisy that it was nothing short of annoying, pretty much anything worthy of reading or clicking through to was getting drowned out by, well, utter crap or repetitive tweets from the same people.
The result was me spending about two hours sifting through all those I was following and deleting anyone who doesn't provide me with something interesting or point to something I can learn from in a professional capacity. The end result was about 800 people I was following were deleted leaving me with about 73 people I consider worthy of following, I've got to say, the instant removal of all that noise was a bit of a relief.
A couple of days after I noticed my follower count started to drop quite a lot, considering it has always moved upward, even if slowly, it was always growing. This got me wondering, is at least some portion of the Twitter community fickle with a mentality of "I'll follow you, if you follow me?" I decided I'd let my account sit for a week or so, it ended up being 10 days, and see just how many people stopped following me, well the end count after 10 days was around 100 people had stopped following.
Now, I'm guessing two things here, one is that those 100 people most likely had small lists and noticed I'd stopped following them and returned the favour, all good and no great loss. Two, at least some of those with larger lists would have stopped following if they had noticed I'd stopped following them, as for the rest I would consider them genuine followers.
My Thoughts
For mine, I think there is definitely a percentage out there with the "I'll follow you, if you follow me mentality", to lose around 100 followers in 10 days is no coincidence after two years of slow but steady growth, especially considering my follower count has never, ever, dropped before!
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