Jan
4
As an experimental exercise, I recently asked a question on LinkedIn to see the range of responses I’d get and I learned something somewhat obvious, but pretty interesting.
The question was simple: “What are the top five reasons to unfollow someone on Twitter?” I think I asked the question believing that I’d discover a set of answers that would be common to all of us Twitter users. As I read through the answers, however, it became apparent that there were no right, or wrong, or even universal reasons. Though there were a few commonly accepted rationales, largely the reasons that influence each user’s choice to unfollow someone was relative to each individual user.
This exercise taught me about the need to be sensitive to the needs, habits and preferences of others—particularly of their communication style. That gives some useful clues as to how one should best go about handling their engagement marketing efforts on Twitter.
Here are the answers I got from my LinkedIn friends (a big thanks to everyone who chimed in!):
“What are the top five reasons to unfollow someone on Twitter?”
- They are sending out Tweets of no value too often
- —William T. Cooper, @MktArticle
- Too many posts concerning what they had for lunch
- —Dave Maskin, @DaveMaskin
- Sending tweets which are offensive
- Sending too many tweets, will also offer no value
- Personally attacking you with their tweet(s)
- You follow a number of other individuals who tweet the same information
- You simply have too many followers and their tweets get ‘lost’
- —Jeff Peterson, @jeffspeterson
- SPAM X 5
- —Kenneth Larson, @Smalltofeds
- Non value-added tweets
- —Mark Miller, (no Twitter handle)
- They are on a list with a theme/subject in which you are interested and so you do not need to follow them as an individual
- —David Balmer-Cribb, @MotoDbc
- Not related to your Twitter (subject and behavior)
- Never participate to your tweetings
- Do not follow you
- Follow non-accepted twitter profile
- Tweets that create a bad imagine on your profile
- —Delcour Camille, @Blue_Cam
- Tweets of no value to me – such as quotes from other people
- They do nothing but retweet others
- They Tweet more than once or twice a day. (Unless they are a news aggregate such as Mashable, CNN, etc.)
- They Tweet too many advertisements for their products or services
- The clearly followed me only so I would follow them back
- —Byran Beaty, @Decomplexificat
- 66% Person Tweets too much
- 58% Tweets appear automated
- 47% Repeated sharing of the same links
- 38% Person doesn’t Tweet
- 34% Person Tweets about him/herself all the time
- —Lars Malmqvist, @larsmalmqvist, cited results from a survey
- No valuable tweets/spam
- Offensive tweets
- —Donna Krech, @DonnaKrech
- Spam
- Tweet every 1 minute
- Incompatible there follower list
- Long inactivity for months
- —Brijendra Chaudhary, MHRM @BrizHR
What do you think?
Do you find the reasons listed here to be true in your case? Or do you have other reasons for unfollowing someone on Twitter? What are your reasons?
Alicia Vaz
I design easy to implement social media strategies to help beauty industry professionals better engage clients and grow their business.
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