The argument to follow fewer people on Twitter
In addition to deactivating my Facebook account, I also reduced the number of people I followed on Twitter by more than 50 percent.
Twitter makes it easy to follow more people than you would friend on Facebook, simply because it’s not a two-way relationship. You can follow. They can follow. But you don’t have to both follow each other. So, you can quickly accumulate more people than you ever would on Facebook, because one doesn’t require another permission to see tweets.
It’s this relative ease of following that leads to users introducing a lot of noise into their use of the service. That’s what I found to be the case when I followed more than 400 accounts. Many of these I followed because they followed me first. I was doing it to be nice, not because I really knew who they were. Many were journalists that found me via a blog post from 10,000 Words, who recommended me as one of 10 journalists to follow on Twitter.
At first, it was very exciting. My Twitter feed was constantly refreshed and there was always something new. No more waiting around for my friends to start updating their own feeds — look at what these other people are saying! But then came the PR, marketing, SEO guru types, who I fell into a trap adding.
From there, the noise continued to increase. And then it reached a tipping point where I found I was missing the tweets of those I really wanted to hear from. Personal friends and people I actually knew in real life. This is what led to me going through the list of people I followed and started unfollowing to find the signal.
I know some people actually have thousands following them and follow thousands themselves, but I think that’s just absurd. If Twitter is supposed to be about what you and your friends are doing, then how can you have that conversation if there are so many others burying the more important, more real voices in your feed?
A year ago, I asked whether Twitter was useful or useless. At the end, I concluded that it’s not a “must-use” service. Using and observing Twitter for the past year has changed my mind on that. I still wouldn’t say it’s a “must use” service, but a “helpful service.” However, it’s only as useful and helpful as you make it. It’s very easy to abuse it and let yourself be abused by it.
I also wrote this in my blog post, which I proceeded to ignore as I added more people to the list of those I followed:
I will admit that Twitter can become a bit spam-ish (or is that bacn-ish?) if you follow too many people. While some people have chosen to follow me, I’ve made the decision to not follow all of them back. Frankly, I’m just not interested in what they have to say. And I don’t feel bad if people aren’t interested in following my Twitter feed either. Social tools shouldn’t mean social obligations, it should be about providing utility.
I emphasized that last line because I think it’s important to remember and generally can make anything more enjoyable.