Being a Twitter follower is not what it used to be.
The wildly influential social media platform used to be fun and exciting the way it broadcasts people’s jokes, musings, intelligent retweets, and images. At one time I spent a lot time cultivating who I followed and who followed me.
Nowadays not so much. Today’s Twitter is full of bizarre and angry people who shoot out tweets by the thousands of political, sexual, and race-based ramblings and memes. Worse, users are always trying to sell me something.
And using a platform that is so actively abused by the world’s so-to-be worst president ever just makes it seem a little bit dirty.
Subsequently, I’m not inclined to hang out on Twitter much anymore except to post an occasional link to a blog post, retweet an occasional post, or niggle a spelling-challenged Trump supporter.
In between, I have Nimble Quotes posting tech-related quotations three times per day, and Crowdfire serving automatic greetings to new followers.
I’m just not that into Twitter anymore.
What’s really bugging me about Twitter community now is this bait-and-unfollow trick where someone follows you one week only to unfollow the next.
Everybody wants more followers than they are following, but this is ridiculous.
Twitter Followers and Unfollowers
The goal with Twitter is to have more Followers than you are Following. That makes you look more influential. To achieve this goal, one needs to constantly scale back their Following list to make the Followers list supersede it.
For years I wondered why my following would go up, up, up, then down. Up, up, down. Two steps up, one step back.
I get weekly alerts from Crowdfire, saying “Blogsitestudio, your stats are here!” They show me how many follows and unfollowers I got that week. It used to be that I would average more followers than unfollowers, but lately it’s been a bit of a wash.
But I really noticed the bait-and-unfollow trick a few months ago. Up until then I was being pretty responsive to new followers and faithfully following back the ones who were all about tech or writing or marketing.
After I realized the same people I had just started following were immediately unfollowing me, I stopped wasting my time. I don’t think I’ve refollowed anyone new for the past month.
I even saw people who had followed me, then unfollowed, proceed to refollow and then unfollow again. Talk about indecisive!
As I said, I don’t hang out on Twitter much anymore as I have web sites to design, blogs and stories to write, photos to edit. In other words, work. I don’t have time to play games on social media and have no patience for people who do.
Do these unfollowers trust that I’m too busy to notice when they unfollow me? Do they not know I use similar tools that show me plain as day that they dropped me?
If I had more time, I’d call these serial unfollowers out the way @ColneyTech has.
Fake Followers
Do you ever see a Twitter user with a gazillion followers and wonder how the hell they managed to get such a following, given their lame-assed tweets?
The answer is fake followers. Twitter accounts that are basically robots set up by companies who promise you “10,000 followers for only $5!” You can buy fake followers to boost your profile and charge money to tweet something, the same way Kim Kardashian has.
To sift through my fakers, I found a cool Chrome extension called Twitter Audit.
Each audit takes a random sample of 5000 Twitter followers for a user and calculates a score for each follower. This score is based on number of tweets, date of the last tweet, and ratio of followers to friends. The pro version allows you to block fakers and hide your audit since you can audit anyone’s account to find out how make fake Twitter followers they have.
Fake followers make you look good on your profile and maybe someone will pay you to tweet to them. But you’ll always know that fewer people are getting your tweets that it appears, so keeping fakers on board just makes you as much a fake as them.
I’ll Follow the Sun
So that’s my rant about Twitter followers. Please tell me if you’ve had similar troubles with Twitter.
Of course, I would love for you to follow me @blogsitestudio and @marikane, so you can read my words of wisdom there. But, if you just follow me to get a numbers boost, please save it for suckers who will bite.
Because tomorrow may rain, I’ll follow the sun.
Subscribe to Blogsite Studio and get my new ebook!
Secure Your WordPress Website: How to Protect Yourself from Hackers, Spammers, Scrappers, and Imbeciles
A field guide to stopping evildoers from breaking into your website, stealing data, and injecting malware.
Plus, what to do after a hack!