Keeping it Relevant on Twitter

Well, I finally did it. I purged my Twitter account. That's right, I "unfollowed," with a mission in mind.

I have always been a proponent of relevancy, and Twitter is a key component of our PR strategy - giving us that connection and engagement with our followers.

But, quantity over quality was not working for me. I decided to go the opposite route. @floridahalfback was my first account on Twitter - a tourism and relocation specialist in the Southeast U.S. I have created other Twitter accounts for various divisions and clients of Leisure Linx, but I got my feet wet in early 2009 with @floridahalfback. I quickly built my follow list, focusing on the region that this account serves the most. Then I started following my follower's follows (a mouthful in itself). I was quick to follow everyone who followed me, and my follow/follower numbers stayed consistently close in quantity.

But as time went on and I passed the 500 follow mark, I found myself overwhelmed with replies, retweets, clicking links, and going deeper and deeper into these links until I was so far off the mark I had to slap myself awake! Have you ever been driving your car and suddenly realize you don't remember the last ten minutes of driving? Did I stop at the stoplights? Did I really make that turn off that busy exit? I remember none of it, but I know I must have done it well. It's the same feeling with irrelevant social media connections.

I don't know about you, but my time with social media is limited. AND it is very important. But my goal is to  balance my "A" priorities (revenue-producers) with "B" priorities (engagement and maintenance).

So on January 9, 2010, I started unfollowing the irrelevant. It was a bit scary. I was careful at first to only unfollow those that hadn't tweeted in a few months. But as I dug deeper, I reminded myself of the goal to follow those individuals and businesses who are relevant to this Twitter account. I dropped my following count from 710 to 475, a 49% drop - all within about a one hour period. It made me nervous but I was a woman on a mission to get organized so I crossed my fingers and watched the results. Within minutes, my follower count dropped by a few - probably auto-bots. The next day I checked my Twitter Counter results. Still just a handful of drops. All in all, for the first 24 hours I lost 38 followers, and a few days later that total grew to 52. So within the first week I had lost 6% of my followers and yet I was following nearly 50% fewer Tweeters.

Now ten days later, this Twitter account is noticeably efficient and meaningful. I am interacting with related businesses and visitors, retweeting relevant information, and I have more time for my "A" priorities.

I must note that not all of my deleted follows were irrelevant to my overall business, just irrelevant to this account. I subsequently followed these folks from another Twitter account such as @Strategy140.

If you have time on your hands and love to read and research, I don't recommend purging your Twitter account, but in my case it has handed me back a nice chunk of time to know those I follow better, and to engage more efficiently.