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Dealing with people who unfollow you on Twitter

There are endless books and articles being published that deal the subject of gaining followers on Twitter. Less is written about unfollowers. It’s important to understand why people stop following you on Twitter as this can alert you to things you might be doing wrong. You can be unfollowed for a number of reasons:

1. You tweet to often: Your followers feel that they’re being spammed by you with constant updates.
2. Your content of your tweets may not be relevant to your followers.
3. You tweet too infrequently: Your followers may not feel you have much to say.
4. Your tweets are just links to articles, you don’t actually say anything.
5. Your tweets are full of conversations with other tweeters that mean nothing to the people who follow you.
6. Some followers are narcissists, they only follow you if you follow them back. This is especially true of spammers who are looking to build a mass of followers very quickly. Within a couple of days of you following them back, they will often unfollow you as they are only interested in 1000s of followers and are not actually interested in the people they follow.

http://fllwrs.com/ will tell you who has followed and unfollowed you recently and when it happened.

http://www.justunfollow.com gives you a long list of all your unfollowers and enables you to unfollow them in bulk.

It’s really important that you regularly “spring clean” the people you follow on Twitter. Otherwise you will be overwhelmed by dozens of updates on your Twitter timeline every minute. You really need to be selective of who you follow, even if it means unfollowing the people who follow you, otherwise you won’t be able to keep up with the tweets that really matter. Here are some tips for unfollowing: 

1. Don’t feel the need to reciprocate with every person who follows you. If their tweets are relevant to you follow them, if not, don’t.
2. Don’t expect every tweeter to follow you back straight away. Popular tweeters may be gaining dozens of followers each day and may not be able to keep up with everyone they follow. Besides, you should also follow people because their tweets are interesting, not just to be followed.  If they follow you back, that’s a bonus.
3. If there are people you follow who post irrelevant or uninteresting tweets, or if they post too often, unfollow them.
4. If there are tweeters who have stopped tweeting, unfollow them. http://untweeps.com/ enables you to track accounts that have become inactive for 30 or more days. If someone doesn’t bother tweeting for months, they probably don’t have much too say and shouldn’t be followed. 

Inevitably, you may end up unfollowing people who follow you and some followers may end up getting offended and unfollowing you back. It doesn’t matter. Being successful on Twitter is about quality not quantity. Your goal on Twitter should not be to get as many followers as possible but to get high quality followers who may either end up being your clients or who may end up influencing your clients. I have seen spammers who have thousands of followers and I have seen some very successful and well-known internet start ups who have only hundreds of followers. It’s not how many people follow you that matters, it’s WHO follows you that matters.