Wondering why you are losing Twitter followers? Ever posted something and seen your followers immediately start to drop off? Below are 5 common reason why people un-follow.
1. Tweet flooding – There are two types of tweet flooding that spring to mind here, number one being those who tweet every second of the day and number two, those who post all their tweets during their daily allotted hour for Twitter. Now, people one and two may be tweeting informative, useful stuff but if it makes it difficult for people to read their tweet stream, you’re high on the decapitation list. Take a break, step away from Twitter for a while if you tweet all the time or, if you only have a short time dedicated to Twitter, leave more time between tweets. It’s as simple as that.
2. Essay tweets – If you can’t say what you want to say in 140 characters you should be writing a blog. Try not to run over into several tweets – it’s called MICRO-blogging for a reason. @HenryFordNews can get away with this when tweeting live surgery but an essay broken into 8 tweets explaining why you shouldn’t have eaten that cookie requires a blog. Try blogspot.com.
3. @ Spam – Spam is a bit of an oxymoron on Twitter however @ Spam messages are those direct, intrusive messages such as “@CatStormont Why don’t you join our team and distribute our new health food? DM me for details.” It’s like junk mail through the letter box, or cold calls from insurance/market research companies. My answer to these? In the bin or hang up.
4. Irrelevancy – Know your community. If you’re posting about things that are irrelevant to your audience they’re going to drop out. It’s the sifting mechanism for most people on Twitter. I have one person I follow who insists on posting about lunch and dinner but because I like his cynical dark humour I haven’t un-followed @jasonfry. This is the only person I follow who tweets about his lunch though, I prefer tweets of substance and that engage me.
5. Playing the numbers game – People who are just concerned about numbers on Twitter and not conversation are no fun. Ever been followed by someone looking to be followed back, and then been un-followed yourself once they have their numbers bumped up? If you’ve been doing this and your starting to lose followers – you’ve been rumbled.
What is it that makes you un-follow someone on Twitter?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
Very similar set of suggestions to those in my "Twitter rules" post. I guess the thing I've noticed more recently is the number of people appealing for followers on the LinkedIn Twitter groups, as if the numbers are all that matters... as you rightly point out, it's the community that matters (in my opinion). Oddly though, I'm not letting "my community" dictate what I tweet... I simply follow too many folks and have too wide a group who follow me now to be able to accurately judge what I "should" be tweeting about!
ReplyDeleteI suppose what I meant by the Irrelevancy reason is that, however hard you try, this is a reason that you can't really do much about. If I had to make a Twitter cull because I couldn't manage all the people I am following, Id personally pick off people who aren't giving me something I'm interested in.
ReplyDeleteYou shouldn't be offended by being dropped for this reason. How else are people supposed to filter the mass of Tweets out there?