What I've learned from using TwUnfollow.com – Shelby says

Yesterday, Jim gave his view about TwUnfollow and how he uses it to grow his following and network. Due to the kickoff of football season with a Packer’s game tonight, #shehechat will not take place over on Twitter at 8 p.m. CST like normal. We’ll return next week, but with guest co-host @Einley because I will be on vacation and I am unsure if I’ll be able to join in because service may be spotty.

For the past week, I’ve been dreading 10 a.m. That’s the hour that TwUnfollow, a service I’m allowing to monitor my Twitter account, sends me an email and lets me know who has unfollowed me in the past 24 hours.

To be honest, I never would have signed up for this service if Jim hadn’t wanted to do “She Said, He Said” blog posts about it. I haven’t been using it as long as Jim so I don’t have his long-term views about its helpfulness. My short-term reaction is an audible sigh when I see the daily email and some slight hesitation to open it.

I dread this email because I know I will spend at least 30 minutes going through the unfollower list and looking at those Twitter accounts. Depending on a person’s profile, I may also fret about why they chose to unfollow me. I’m not a seeker of followers and I’m not in a race to acquire 10,000 of them. However, when I lose them, I have to ask myself what I may be doing wrong on Twitter.

Was it something I said?

Some of you may know that I take great pains to adhere to my personal social media strategy. Much of my reasoning for having this strategy in place is not to offend people or argue with them on public networks. I figure that this will give me more credibility.

Three days ago, 12 Twitter accounts unfollowed me overnight. That may not seem like a lot, but it concerned me. I went back through my Twitter timeline to try to figure out if I said or did something out of the ordinary. Of course, I hadn’t.

Why should I care if they unfollow me?

Since I couldn’t find any offensive material in my tweets, I decided to take a look at each of the profiles of the accounts that unfollowed me. Of the 12, two held my interest for very different reasons.

Account 1: The first appeared to be an account that ran a relevant chat that I might find interesting. The tweets in the timeline seemed authentic and there was an actual person used as the avatar. I was not following this account.

Account 2: The second account was more troublesome. This person was local to my area. I had been following the account for a long time and could even remember some one-on-one interactions. I couldn’t – and still can’t – understand why I was unfollowed by this account.

Should following be reciprocal?

I admit that I only reserve one day a week lately to do my follow-backs on Twitter. I’m also more selective about following back because I am nearing the 2,000 following mark. Until my own followers reach 2,000, Twitter won’t allow me to add more past that mark.

One of the reasons I like limiting my follow-backs once a week is that it tends to weed out some of the accounts using services that automatically follow you and then unfollow after a matter of hours or days if you don’t follow back. (The other 10 accounts that unfollowed me from that list very well may have been services like these. The followers were sky high and the number of tweets were minuscule. That’s usually a pretty good indication.)

However, perhaps some real people were frustrated that I didn’t follow them back right away. That’s possible, but I just can’t reciprocate follows all the time.

Is action needed?

Based on my research on that list of unfollowers, I made these decisions with the following outcomes:

1) I followed  Account 1 above and gave it a chance. Again, the tweets looked authentic and I thought I might gain some good interactions. I was wrong. Immediately, I started receiving direct messages full of spam. After the third one, I cut my losses and unfollowed them. I think we are even now.

2) As for Account 2, I left it alone. I didn’t unfollow to be spiteful and I also didn’t reach out to that person to inquire why they unfollowed me because I’m also not that needy.

In the end, TwUnfollow did teach me something

While I still dread the daily unfollow emails, I have found going to TwUnfollow.com itself gives me more helpful information. On the site, they list followers as well as unfollowers. The same day I lost 12 followers, I gained eight others and these were quality follows unlike most of the unfollowers.

I also like that TwUnfollow graphs out your follower statistics. Jim says that on his account TwUnfollow gives him the date of when the account first started following him. While I don’t have that when I log in (maybe I just have to be a subscriber longer), I would find that very helpful in determining who’s a worthy unfollow versus a worrisome unfollow.

I really thought I would “unfollow” (read: unsubscribe) TwUnfollow itself after this little experiment was finished, but I don’t think I will. It’s taught me enough about my own social media strategy and my following techniques that I can see the value. Besides, any service that makes me think this much usually keeps my interest for awhile.

She Said, He Said news

Again, there will be no #shehechat on Twitter tonight. We figured if the President could move his speech because of the opening night of football, we could postpone #shehechat. Make sure to tune in next week with special guest @Einley though at the normal time: Thursday, 8 p.m. CST.

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