If you’re like me, you may monitor the folks who unfollow you on Twitter (I use a service called Twunfollow). This is helpful to me to see what types of people are unfollowing me, so I might be able to intuit why they stopped following me, in case I want to make any improvements (one of the small assessments in the Twitter Management Toolkit… which maybe I’ll write someday).
Here’s something I’ve noticed a lot of in the past few months:
People who start following me one day, will quickly unfollow me within 3-4 days if I do not follow them back.
These tweeters fall into two categories:
- Brands
- People with enormous follower counts
What does this say to me and why do I think it’s a horrible idea?
- You likely have some tool set up to automatically unfollow people who don’t follow you within a set period of time (mere days).
- This means you clearly only care about the number that person adds to your Following count.
- #1-2 mean you’re not interested in conversation, and are probably never going to attempt to engage with me directly.
- #1-3 mean I have absolutely no interest in ever following or listening to YOU because you don’t actually know what it means to be in a digitally social space and probably just want to broadcast TO me.
- #1-4 means you lose.
Nice try, but no cigar.



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TIME’s last issue had a big photo of an iPhone on it that showed….you guessed it….Twitter. The title of their article was “![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_c.png?x-id=8be0b135-7aff-4ccd-be8c-9d07476765dd)

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