Will Marlow

My first observations/conclusions are as follows:

1. So far, no one from the list of people I interact with regularly has unfollowed me. 

2. There were LOTS of bots and spammers following me, who were only interested in a recipricol follow (which I'm happy to lose). 

3. There is a big advantage to following back your followers, in that you can always tell if someone is following you just by looking at their feed.  If I don't ever go back to a 1:1 ratio, not being able to know this will take some getting used to.

4. I am going to add the initial people back very quickly, because I miss the DMs that this group sends me (I don't miss DMs from spammers or bots).

and lastly,

5. There are many people who take the "follow back" ethic very seriously and personally.  I received more than one email angry email suggesting that I was being very rude.  If that's the case, I apologize.  I tried to take precautions against this by warning people in the days leading up to this experiment (which served the dual purpose of telling me who is reading my Tweets).  In any case, my reason for doing this experiment was not to be rude, but to learn more about the dynamics of following/unfollowing on Twitter, and for the next several days I'll be monitoring what happens.

(PS - Interestingly, although my goal was to make it down to zero before adding people back, Twitter's odd numbering system never let me get down below 92 people on my follower list, despite not having a record that I was following anyone.  In addition to that, Tweets from people who I no longer followed continued to show up in my feed until I replaced them with newly re-followed people.)

Filed under  //   Follower Count   How to measure Twitter influence   Social Media   Social Media Plan   Social media strategy   Twitter   Twitterholic   Unfollow  

On Friday I wrote about my plan to do an experiment in which I unfollow 100% of the people I'm following right now, and then I'll re-follow only people who are not spammers or bots, and who I'm actually interested in.  I am keeping a list right now of people who I interact with, or know, or who I find interesting, and I'll re-follow that list very quickly after I hit zero.  If you want to be added to that list, just @reply me, or send me a DM, or email me at will@alumnifidelity.com.

On Friday I talked about WHY I was doing this.  In this post, I want to talk about a few things that I hope to LEARN from doing this.

I look forward to learning:

1. How many people unfollow me, and thus, how many people on Twitter are only interested in following people who follow them back.
2. What happens to my "click through" rate.
3. What happens to my @reply and DM rate.
4. Whether this generates new word of mouth buzz and leads to new followers.
5. What this does to the overall visibility of my Twitter presence.

Confession: I'm also hopeful that I will be able to provide more evidence that having a large following is NOT a good measure of influence on Twitter.  I believe that there is a misconception going around that a Twitter feed is only valuable if it "reaches" hundreds of thousands of strangers, as evidenced by huge follower lists.  Firstly, I think that Twitter can be valuable even if it reaches ONE person who you wouldn't have reached with another mechanism.  Secondly, I think that huge follower lists are faux-metrics.  Hopefully my experiment can illustrate why the second point can be misleading, and possibly it can help people appreciate their small but committed core of followers, who are the source of true value on Twitter.

Filed under  //   Follower Count   Followers   How to measure Twitter influence   Social Media   Social Media Experiment   Social Media Plan   Twitter   Unfollow   Will Marlow