Who should be Unfollowed?

Who to unfollow? We all feel a little happiness, when we gain new followers but ,having seen what we have said about bots and trolls, we need to be sure that we identify them and root them out quickly. It is recommended that you check your new followers regularlym to block the bad guys quickly. Vetting every new follower account is important not only to avoid acquiring bots and trolls but, also, to vet that the follower may be genuinely interested in what you have to say (and vice versa).

One other annoying feature of Twitter is that there are some people who grow their accounts by following other people, watching who follows back and, then, quietly unfollowing them, a few days later, in the hope that this will not be noticed. You might say “what harm does it do?” but we would add a caution here.

Twitter's Follow Limits

It may never matter to you, but Twitter has a limitation rule, which it applies, if you end up following 5000 people. This rule basically means that the number of people you are following cannot exceed 110% of the number following you, and Twitter will stop you following others, until you get your numbers in balance. Lots of people I see hit 5000 following, when they may have only 1000 or fewer followers, and are reluctant to prune this list, hoping that thousands of extra people will follow them, to get them out of the problem.

You may even see appeals from people asking this. Having learned this early on, I have always been very strict and follow very few people, who don’t follow back. I follow about 2% more that follow me at present. You may feel this is a little strict, but for me at least it imposes a certain discipline.

Interesting or Boring?

The whole point of following someone is to see their interesting output and, often, the experience is that many public figures, for example, do not produce interesting output. Most of us follow a few key journalists and MPs and some university professors, who are experts on given topics - plus a handful of “lay” accounts, who write exceptionally interesting stuff.

Following loads of accounts is only useful if it gives you interesting things to read. It’s good to ask yourself if the person, in question, really adds value to your feed. If not why follow them?

Pruning your Followers List 

In order to maintain a healthy ratio it is also good to prune one's list regularly. If you like to automate this, there are apps available to identify who has followed and unfollowed you, recently. It can still be done, manually by going back and checking one's “following list” and confirming that they also follow back. If you haven’t followed back then you will need to be a very good content producer, or you will be unfollowed.

Based on what has already been written, these are the questions to ask yourself, when you get a new follower, before following back.

• Is there a decent bio with meaningful information?
• Have there been a decent number of tweets and is the message from them consistent?
• Looking at responses to their tweets, how have they replied and is it courteous?
• Is there anything inappropriate or offensive about what they write in their account?
• Anything else to suggest they may be a bot/ troll or scam account?
• Is their content interesting?
• What do we have in common? (as discussed previously, they may be very nice people but if all they write about is crochet then it’s not going to work out).
• Applying these tests consistently will soon become a rapid and simple process. Occasionally you’ll make a mistake but, most of the time, you will protect yourself from bullies (and from boring content).

Deal with Bots and Trolls

One other point. As well as blocking bots and trolls. please report them to Twitter. Blocking them protects you only, reporting them helps to protect others. To be honest, Twitter is not that great at shutting down false accounts but at least you have alerted them to the problem.