What Happens If You Unfollow Most Of Your Twitter Followers?

First, let’s address some background that will lead into the reason why anyone would want to unfollow all the Tweeple they took great amounts of time to follow. When you first sign up for a Twitter account, one of the first things you notice (unless you’re a celebrity of types), is that getting an audience doesn’t happen automatically. Social media strategists have suggested that to get Twitter followers all you need to do is to follow others. The laws of Twitter reciprocity then dictate that if you follow others, chances are, they’ll follow back.

There were even Twitter “pump and dump” programs developed to make this Twitter “reciprocity” growth strategy easier. People found themselves pumping in loads of new followers one day and then dumping the ones who didn’t follow back the next. It seems Twitter has put an end to this mass follow/unfollow approach. Since that time, many who have been growing their Twitter through strategic-follow campaigns over the last year have found themselves following so many people that the noise is too overwhelming to tune into the Twitter conversation at all. To alleviate the problem, there are some traditional solutions: 1) Creating Twitter lists to filter the noise. 2)¬† Using Twitter management platforms like HootSuite or TweetDeck.

But even with these solutions many still find it difficult to follow their Twitter friend streams unless they are “mentioned” or “direct messaged.” Plus, there’s just a huge psychological weight in knowing there are so many people knocking on your Twitter door with information to share. Because of this alone, we asked, what if we just simplified and unfollowed all but our “real” friends on Twitter? Then we proceeded with the test through an experimental account, using ManageFlitter to do the dirty work.

Before the experiment, we were following a little less than 1300 people and had 1304 following back. We were essentially following everyone who followed us. A perfect model of reciprocation–for this reason alone, we worried that dropping so many would mean that they might drop us back.

The first thing we did was to identify and drop those followers that were inactive. Then we reviewed each follower for relevancy and dropped the ones that had been unresponsive to our attempts to engage and those that weren’t relevant to our business. Then we decided, what if we only keep those we either get great info. from or that we actively engage with? This left us following about 50. The amazing thing was that we only lost 17 followers after the purge. Even better, as time has passed, it seems we are getting more organic followers than before. This may be because we have a much more favorable following/follower ratio: 50/1287. Many tend to see a low following/follower ratio as an indicator of popularity and integrity, which also means less spam.

The purging exercise alone (not that we recommend going to the same extreme we did for the sake of this experiment) can cultivate a renewed focus and attention on the friends you keep. Now that all the noise, which was once intimidating and obnoxious has been wiped away, we hope you’ll take a minute to look FastPivot up on Twitter and say hello.