Unfriending on Facebook, unfollowing on Twitter
Why is it that people place so much emphasis on the follow and unfollow? The only time I really pay some attention (and I react rather harshly, I have to say) is when I am following someone who doesn’t follow me back. If he/she dares to send me a DM (obviously leading to me not being able to reply privately) then I immediately unfollow. You want to know why? Because I never do that to anyone who follow me.
Credit: Intersection Consulting
If I had the mental capacity to follow everyone back, I would. But I can’t. I follow 600 people as it stands. But I have reached my point of saturation. It’s particularly important when there are people that I really haven’t engaged with. Not because I don’t want to, but because our interests may be diverging.
I just hope people understand what not being able to reciprocate every follow does NOT mean they’re not worth it. Nothing further from the truth. Even worse? Some people actually are being unfollowed by Twitter (so, it’s not MY fault, it’s Twitter’s!).
How do you feel about unfriending or being unfriended or unfollowed?
This is Entry # 45 of 49
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timely issue seeing as the “unfollow”, “unfriending” issues are ones that i have recently been forced to deal with. on twitter i was following someone who tweeted endlessly all day and night on topics i simply was not interested in ( you know the kind, “now i am eating an apple” and so forth). i stopped following them and felt kind of bad; i was concerned there was a twitter etiquette that i was unfamiliar with.
and then for facebook, i see my friends number goes up and down every day. i can’t help but wonder who stopped being my “friend”. it is hard to tell who stops being your friend when you have a couple hundred facebook “friends”. and then the “block” friend is another weird one altogether; they essentiallly stop existing in your world! you can no longer find someone who has blocked you and, you cannot block them back!
is this the new form of excommunication? bizarre new etiquettes that are developing? it is a brave new world we are living in.
I personally hate following a hand of people that use Twitter as a giant chat room talking between themselves all day. If you want to have a conversation use MSN, or grab a phone. I unfollow immediately if their tweets are mostly conversational and not providing SOME sort of value.
I’ve started unfollowing people. I was following 1200 or 1300 people. It just wasn’t authentic. I couldn’t possibly listen to everyone. So I had to start pruning. I feel bad about it, but I’d be a fake if I said I could follow what’s going on. And people deserve my attention.
I follow as many as I can, but only if their tweet-stream is relatively close to the narrow news-focused topics that I tweet about.
I appreciate it when someone follows me, but I figure that my generally impersonal tweets are being followed by people who are interested in that one issue. Their own tweets might be far more general or more personal than mine.
If I follow streams that have a lot of inter-personal chatter (which is fine in its own right), it causes me to miss the news items that I look for on Twitter.
And besides that, it wouldn’t really be appropriate for me to reply with my news-focused account to one of those more personal items.
I’ve considered setting up a second account for more personal streams, but haven’t done so yet.
That’s my own take on it all, anyway.
Everyone – thanks so much for commenting – I just find it funny that many people place so much value on how many people follow them.
For me the reciprocal follow only serves one purpose – maintaining private conversations. The rest can be done in @ replies