A good friend Adam Price (@adam_price) tweeted something that really struck a chord with me, "don't be part of the problem, if you post something make sure it has some substance." Boy does this make sense. More-and-more the people whom I follow and consider "influencers" tweet what amounts to garbage at 140 characters per minute. Part of me wonders if they actually have so many industry relevant followers to warrant the constant streams of information on interest rate hikes or hot travel destinations. I have to doubt it. The other part of me wonders why I hang on to these accounts, continuing to follow them regardless of how useless every tweet is.
It's all because of Klout (www.klout.com). I love my Klout score, I do. It's something I monitor daily. It's a source of competition among my partners at Speak Social (www.speaksocial.net). Each of us is social media savvy, and we do what we can to keep our score as high as possible. Therefore, I partly blame Klout.com for my unwillingness to no longer follow the accounts that spam my timeline unrelentingly. I worry that if I unfollow someone (even if the reason is good) then they will unfollow me in return - and take the power of their followers with them. This could negatively affect my Klout score for crying out loud and I can't have that, so I hold on like a bad high school relationship. It's sad ... I know.
However, today I turned a new leaf. I was flipping through my timeline and saw ten tweets from the same person, all arriving in back-to-back fashion. Obviously this person's scheduled Tweetdeck tweets had gone haywire, but every single one of the tweets was useless to me and offered no chance for social interaction. There was no way for me to relate to any of the ten tweets about drops in mortgage rates. There was no room for a witty reply with an @-mention, or any reason whatsoever to re-tweet this person. I clicked on his profile to find that every tweet to his 103,000 followers is as non-social as it gets. This guy, no matter how big his social network, does NOT get it. I know that for all my effort in tweeting things I deem worthy, this guy would never re-tweet me. He couldn't care less about me. He's stuck in spam mode. He thinks that branding himself is about dropping thousands of tweets that land where they may, like spilling marbles on a tile floor. His approach is non-direct, non-social and a waste of my time, but can I afford to lose him? I hovered over the unfollow button for a second pondering the repercussions to my Klout score, but I clicked and never felt so free.
I went on to remove over 50 of these types of accounts. Moving forward, I will only follow those who are people first and sales second. Brand yourself if you must, but engage me as a person at least 85% of the time. These are rules for me, but I hope that many will adopt them. It would make Twitter a much nicer place to tweet.