Christmas Day I was over my head with company and a 30 pound bird, potatoes, desserts…etc. My family wanted to help and they went scrambling looking for cheese cutters, carving knives, salad servers, etc.
Sadly, all of those implements reside in two “junk drawers” in my kitchen. They opened them and rummaged through the mess to find what they needed.
I was so embarrassed, and I’d been meaning to clean them up and empty the extra screws in there, the nutcracker that had begun to rust, etc.
So, as soon as I was done with the all that food preparing, I measured those two errant drawers and went to Bed, Bath & Beyond to buy drawer organizers and all shiney new cutlery. It felt great, just looking there…not for company…but for myself. I even threw away the spatula that had lost the handle.
Somehow it brought to mind Twitter, and maybe it was time to clean up my followers too (I often get on these cleaning jags).
So, I sat down yesterday, and decided to clean out my followers by “unfollowing” people who don’t follow me, haven’t tweeted in months, have some old account.
I went up to: http://friendorfollow.com and typed in my name. It showed a hand patting a rabbit and said that if I was popular it might take a while to find all the people I follow, that don’t follow me back. So, I left it running and went out to a party.
When I returned I found that there were over 1400 people I followed like that. I even found that Al Ferretti (I’m President of his fan club) had an old account I had there. One by one, I went through the tedious task of unfollowing people who hadn’t tweeted in months.
I also found people I thought liked me, but weren’t following me (maybe my red pictures popping up got on their nerves). Made it through about 340 and felt great.
I’d made a dent in cleaning up my Twitter followers.
I like to do this, because it gives me room to start picking people of quality, ones I can learn from, talk business with and enjoy.
So, maybe you might want to give it a try. It feels great…and let me know what you think about the process by leaving a comment below or sending me a tweet
Out with the old. In with the new. Happy 2010!
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Lois,
This is a brilliant idea- I have read many of your columns, articles and books. I always learn a ton from you.
You have inspired me to go through my own Twitter account and clean house –just as I do in my own office.
Besides the feeling of freedom–it is also very much like the ancient Chinese practice of Feng Shui.
Thank you for this great post and a wonderful way to begin a new year!
Hi Lois,
Great idea for the New Year. I noticed that your @loisgeller s always active…
Don’t get discouraged by the number of followers… quality over quantity works for me.
Keep up the good job twittering.. you are really a great ambassador.
Great post! Clean up old clutter to make room for new. Always looking forward to your posts here on Twitter WatchDog, keep them coming. Happy New Year
Hi Lois,
Managing the follow/following on twitter is a challenge that I find frustrating. Sometimes when you follow someone, twitter unfollows without your knowledge so you have to police it from both sides. buzzom is another tool that works well.
Happy 2010!
Thank you! Debra…I tried buzzom and couldn’t seem to figure out how it works. It showed me graphics of followers,etc…but I wasn’t sure how to get their names, so I could delete them.
Lois, I greatly benefited from your post. I just recently started using Twitter, so I am trying to build a following. With Twitter limiting the following vs followers ratio, it’s imperative to clean the house often!
Regards,
Ana Hoffman/What Is YourNetBiz
One more thing, Lois – there is another free service http://huitter.com/mutuality2/ that does all the unfollow automatically. Time saver!
Ana
Thank you for telling me about huitter.com…I’m going to check it out now. What is your real name?
I did this for my corporate Twitter account last week, using the Twit Cleaner application. It took six hours of evaluating all the people I was following, and I finally weeded out about 40% of the people we were following. It feels so good to look at a clean stream!
This is a very good idea, one which I am going to definitely utilize! Wonderful blog post, thank you Lois!
Thank you, Kira…my new friend (with a great cat named Oliver)!