Recently I’ve been wishing for something that could tell me which of the people I follow were following me back. It’s something that Twitter deliberately don’t make it easy for you to find out.
I recently found out about JustUnfollow, a service that gives you a list of which of the people you follow follow you, and which of your followers you aren’t following.
Its name is inaccurate: the service is not just about unfollowing – you get two lists, one of which encourages unfollowing, the other of which encourages following. The bias in the tool is towards reciprocal Twitter relationships.
I have different expectations of different people I follow – some I just want to read, others I want to interact with. Of the ones I want to interact with, some I value enough to follow even if they don’t follow me back, others I am only prepared to follow if its reciprocal. It’s only this 3rd groups I’m interested in getting rid of using JustUnfollow.
I often follow people I come across in my Twittering – not famous or renowned people, just people that seem like they might be interesting. I tend to favour people with a follower ratio of around 1 and people whose twitter name is their name (rather than some kind of description of their job, such as BallyhaunisMechanic, SocialMediaMaven etc.).
I’ve found some really great twitterers this way that enrich my Twitter stream, but most of those are the ones who’ve followed me back and with whom I’ve gone on to have conversations. I follow some people in Idaho that I came across through some unremembered Twitter digression, and they are funny. It all started with @WalterHawn, and I now also follow some of his friends.
But as well as a few goodies, there are quite a lot of people in my stream that I follow and I can’t remember why and have never read anything good by them. I might consider keeping them if we have a reciprocal relationship, but if they don’t even follow me back, they’re gone.
I was very surprised to find out that more than half of my followers are people I don’t follow myself. I try to keep a ratio of around 1:1 and I had lazily presumed that mostly I followed the same people as followed me, but although that was true in my early Twitter days in 2006, as time has gone one things have changed.
So I’m going to start manicuring my unkempt Twitter follow list. I’m following nearly 400 people and I don’t think increasing that number is going to make my experience on Twitter better. Better is going to have to come from quality rather than quantity. That means more unfollowing. I’ll still pick up some randomers to see how they work out. But I’ll cull them if they don’t offer me something back in the way of either making me laugh, making me think, or at the very, very least following me back.
