Folla back y'all! Na.

First the title is in reference to Holla Back by Fabolous and it’s about returning follows on Twitter. When I joined the Twitter party I read everywhere about how it was proper etiquette to follow back the people that followed you. Also, that it was a good idea to request people with hopes they would follow back and that the more the followers the better. Well, after using Twitter for quite sometime I have decided that might not be the best option.

Here are the problems with just following anyone back out of courtesy.

1. Increased spam. If you blindly follow people back it seems like half of them are blindly pushing their agenda and thus all their tweets are about them and their services.
2. Pushes legit tweets down. When I log into Twitter and see my most recent tweets I rarely see something that is worth a damn. However, when I log on to Facebook I am constantly checking out the news feed. The big difference is that I only connect with friends and family on Facebook and I actually care about what they are posting. I have no personal connections with these random people on Twitter and I don’t see how you can develop that many close relationships with thousands of people.
3. I use Twitter less often. I have found that I rarely log into Twitter to see what is going on because I don’t care what people are posting about, and thus I share less about what is going on with me to people who may be interested.

So I no longer concern myself with who follows me. If you care about what I tweet, then follow me – but if you don’t care, then don’t follow me. I will be flattered if you follow me, but I won’t follow back blindly. Ultimately what is the difference between someone not following me and someone that follows me and doesn’t care what I have to tweet?  In my mind, nothing.

So with that being said, I have decided to unfollow a significant amount of people. I was following about 750 people but dropped that to 190. The sad part is that shortly after I did this my number of followers went from about 675 to 540 – which means at least 135 people were following me only because I followed them back. However, after using Twitter for the past few days I actually am not finding content relevant to my needs and conversations I care about. It has become a much more worthwhile experience. I also suspect while my number of followers is down, my audience is still the same.

tl;dr – follow me @bandholz