Twitter’ers: Friend or Foes?
To Block or Not to Block
Recently I’ve engaged in a few conversations about when you should unfollow someone on Twitter and what parameters I use to decide if I want to follow back, those who are following me. With Qwitter you can now signup to find out when someone stops following you and what your last twit was, before they unfollowed.
I’ve found great value in my friends on Twitter and highly recommend this tool. However, in some rare occasions I’ve found that I really need to unfollow a Twitter’er because they were simply ruining my experience and frankly I don’t have to tolerate it on Twitter.
So when do I unfollow?
- Excessive Vulgarity
- General Abuse (example: one twit after another of "decoding a bug", t"transfer of gig-frame quadry cypher geek talk")
- Lying about anything
- Using twitter to perpetuate cyber-bulling
- Generally being inappropriate
Really I’m fairly laid back and in a year’s time, I’ve only unfollowed and blocked three people. I found out later that LOTS of other Twitter’ers did the same to this folks.
Reciprocal Followers
The easy part is who to unfollow. The harder part is knowing who not to follow, in the first place. I get tons of follow requests every day, just as most of you do. Some are pretty easy to decide to not allow to follow, some others will require you to read the past 24 hours of posts, first.
Here are my clues that a Twitter User is not worth following back:
- They have one single comment and its a link to their webpage
- They haven’t updated in six months
- The series of comments are related to some male enhancement drug
- Some female is telling how "ready" she is for you to visit her site (for a fee)
Anyone, in general, who’s sole purpose is to sell me something
The follow requester has 2,500 people that they are following and 10 people are following back
So, now that I’ve shared, what clues do you use to ensure that you’re Twitter time is enjoyable?
Hey, Matt. I typically follow many of the same rules you do. Also, (forgive me for sounding shallow) if some one has a scary photo and we have nothing in common, I decline them. Avatars matter! The main thing I do to ensure my Twitter time is enjoyable is that I keep my follows and followers #’s down. I like to catch up with what’s happening to people in my Twitter stream. If I add too many, the whole experience gets diluted.
By the way, this is one kickin’ blog format.
October 25th, 2008 at 5:42 pmMatt, you’ve covered a lot of the reasons I typically do not return a follow, or decide to un-follow someone. Another reason I’ve un-followed someone is when I get a long trail of “ping fm” tweets in a row (I had over 40 the other day by the same person) or a long string of rants or “snivels” that are usually accompanied by comments about beer. I really enjoy twitter for being able to reach my tweeple, but not for listening to drunks. BTW, love your theme!
Julissa Jumper’s last blog post..Is Twitter for Real? - 3 Reasons I Use Twitter for Business and Pleasure
October 26th, 2008 at 4:30 am