This week I carved out some time to go through the people that I am following on Twitter and delete most of them. The platform has this rule that once you hit following 2,000 people you can't follow more people until your ratio of followers to following reaches some magical secret ratio status. Which means, that you need more people following you to follow more people. I completely disagree with this feature, but here is how Twitter explains it.
Few things are more frustrating than stumbling on someone totally awesome on Twitter, and then not being able to follow them, without deleting others.
Who I Deleted
I took a look at the people I have been following and I realized that a huge amount of them weren't following me back. I joined Twitter in early 2009 so I assume by now that most of the people I followed early on will never follow me. If you were following me and I deleted you by accident, I apologize. I had to do it manually and went through it rather fast.
Celebrities
I deleted almost all of the celebrities that I had been following. These people rarely follow other people on Twitter and they almost never communicate directly to others. Besides if I want to hear what they are saying I will watch them get chassed on sites like TMZ.
Athletes
I wasn't following too many athletes, but I deleted any that I was following. As with celebrities, for the most part they weren't saying anything of interest to me.
News Sites
I was following a lot of news Twitter handles. This one was a tough one for me because I am a news junkie. I kept a handful of my favorite but deleted a lot more than I thought. I find on Twitter that the news sites rarely are breaking the news in my newsfeed. I often see a friend tweeting about breaking news before the news sites. I still kept pages like @socialmedia2day in my newsfeed.
Bands, Events, and TV Shows
I am a huge fan of music so I was following a lot of bands and musical acts. But I really use Twitter more for business than for personal entertainment so their tweets were not that amusing for me. The same goes with television shows and events.
Thought Leaders
This was another tough section of people for me to delete. I had to keep some of my favorites like Seth Godin and Gary Vaynerchuk (who is already following me #humblebrag). Other thought leaders were a lot easier for me to delete because they tweeted so infrequently that I had forgot that I followed them in the first place.
Egg Heads
I also deleted people with the little egg as a profile. This is a sure sign that the person is not using their Twitter account because they never even added a profile picture.
Who I Didn't Unfollow
I did not unfollow people or brands that brought me value and information that I wanted on a regular basis. This is the whole reason for using Twitter in the first place. However, if you are obsessed with nonsense and want to follow Kim Kardashian and Kanye West, it's your universe so have at it.
Also if you are a huge sports fan and only want to follow athletes, who am I to stop you. That is kind of the beauty of Twitter; you can create a content stream uniquely catered to your own personal flavor.
I was able to drop my following number from 2000 to 629. This gives me plenty of room to follw people using Twitter to communicate. If you are actively using Twitter for business please follow me here @jimmycalder