Why would you unfollow someone?

Glancing down my feed on twitter earlier today I saw someone pose a question about what criteria people used when deciding to unfollow someone on there.

This got me thinking – as these things do and I thought I would set out my reasons for hitting the unfollow button. I should say that these are MY reasons and I would not encourage anyone to use my methods but instead to develop your own from what you consider important.

The first thing I need to say is that I’m really disorganised! Seriously. I hardly ever go through my list but I do use Twentyfeet to monitor who stops following me and depending on how much ‘value’ I place on their posts I will often unfollow someone as a result.

Another ‘useful’ service I use is Twit Cleaner which after a few minutes (depending on how many followers YOU have) will give you a report based on what they tweet about – for instance if someone posts only links to a particular site TC will list it ‘Dodgy Behaviour’ then it’ll up to you if you want to unfollow them or not. Just click on their avatar in TC and it will unfollow them a bit later on to save Twitter getting bogged down with unfollow requests.

So, apart from these helpful apps how else do I decide to do the deed?

Firstly, I will often unfollow someone if my feed seems to be taken up by them – you all know the type, 30 odd tweets per day and most of them either in the morning or the afternoon. Now we’ve all had a few days in our time on Twitter when we’ve posted a lot – maybe we’re ‘reporting’ from an event or seminar, or possibly ‘live-tweeting’ the action during a day but when it happens every day, or least most days I do sometimes think “I don’t really need to read quite so much from this person, after all I already follow their blog and I can catch up with them there.”

I think it’s perfectly fine to stop following someone in those circumstances.

I don’t subscribe to the belief that ALL a person’s posts should be about their field of work or whatever but there is a balance that needs to be struck. Many of the Housing types I follow seem to tweet about football on Saturdays - now I don’t like football but I won’t stop following a person just because of a tweets about it – BUT I usually follow someone for a particular reason, maybe they’re a housing professional and I want to hear what they have to say about policy announcements from Govt or they’re a social media geek and I’ll want to be reading about latest trends in SM or how to do it better…if they stray too far from that ‘purpose’ too often then I may well consider unfollowing them – but again, it will depend on the ‘quality’ of the tweets that are ‘on-topic’ (as far as I’m concerned anyway).

At the end of the day it will boil down to that in all such decisions really – do the tweets that I want to read come often enough with enough ‘quality’ that I will put up with the football, the running (or cycling), and the family news. More often that not I don’t unfollow people – I like to read that they’re pleased #MUFC won a match (whoever they are??), or that they’ve completed the London Marathon (well done to everyone that did it by the way!) because I’m basically a social person and this is SOCIAL media after all.

Does all that help? Probably not, but it is personal and unfollowing someone is about as personal as it gets on Twitter. I’m not one of these people who insists on you following me just because I’ve followed you, or vice-versa. I follow you because I’m interested in what you have to say, I hope you’re following me for the same reasons.

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