Twitter is a huge asset, and having a good amount of followers is great for generating leads, getting help with problems quick, and establishing key relationships (not to mention it’s a nice ego boost).
It’s normal to see your follower numbers fluctuate a little bit due to scammers, impatient people who are only looking for reciprocal follows, people just losing interest, and issues on Twitter’s end. It happens. No big deal. It becomes a problem when you’re regularly seeing a big number of people unfollowing you.
What comes next is a common sense, palm-to-forehead, complete “duh” list of reasons why this might be happening to you. And because it would be stupid to just point out everything that’s wrong, I’ve added some advice on what you can do to remedy the problem too.
Everything you tweet is pointless.
This would be the person who tweets about mundane daily activities, problems in their relationship, their pet, what they’re wearing…and the list goes on. There’s no reason this person is tweeting other than to get attention or waste time, because it’s not adding any value to the conversation.
This kind of content would be better suited on Facebook using the status update feature. Facebook, by nature, is a more personal social networking site. Save the “ME ME ME” content for your friends and family on Facebook, and use Twitter to build more of a community by sharing helpful content (and occasionally saying something “ME ME ME” to show that you’re human).
You don’t tweet often enough. Or you tweet every five seconds.
If you don’t tweet regularly (whatever that number is for you – it’s at least 5 times a day for me), I’ve officially forgotten about you. Therefore, when I’m cleaning out my list of people I follow, I don’t even remember who you are, so I unfollow you. You’re not memorable if you’re not consistently involved.
Likewise, if every other tweet in my stream is from you, I’m going to unfollow you. I don’t need you to be in my face that much, and if you’re tweeting that much, you’re not focused on quality.
Find a balance that works for you and stick with it. I don’t care how often you tweet. But if you set the precedent of tweeting daily, then I’m going to assume that you’re going to continue to tweet daily and I’ll expect that from you in the future.
You’re the spammer and/or Internet marketer from hell. Just admit it.
This is loose criteria for who I consider to be in this group:
- You randomly reply to me, out of the blue, because I mentioned a keyword you’re watching.
- Every tweet on your stream is about one of your products. It’s most likely the same tweet over and over.
- You have auto-DMs set up that pitch me, right from the start.
- The only replies you send to people are about you, your product, and how both will change lives immediately.
The fix for this (other than CUT IT OUT)? Change your approach. Follow people just to follow them. Spend time listening. You’ll gain more insight into your market and leads by doing that for one day, than by sending unsolicited pitches to 100 people.
Frankly, it takes a lot for me to unfollow someone and I really don’t need to that often (because I actually view every single person who follows me and make a decision to follow them back, and I’ve done this from the start). They really have to be in one of these three categories for me to consider it.
Bottomline: Twitter is about sharing knowledge and feedback with a large community and connecting with others of similar interests. Don’t make Twitter painful for those who are trying to go about it right.
P.s. – If we’re not following each other on Twitter already, follow me and I’ll follow you back (unless you fall into one of these categories)!
