Oh no I’ve lost followers on Twitter!
Well, yes while I’ve lost a few followers today this blog post is for anyone who stares helplessly and forlornly at their decreasing followers count on Twitter wondering what they did to deserve it.
Losing a follower is not like losing a friend.
I discussed this with Lachlan Hardy a few weeks back; I was curious as to the reason he chose to unfollow me. I had assumptions and reached conclusions founded on nothing more than a knee-jerk “Nobody likes me anymore!” emotional response which I knew were ridiculous … but I couldn’t just dismiss the issue. I felt I’d done something wrong. I was convinced I’d done something to negatively impact our relationship.
He’s not the first person to unfollow me and of those who have only one had contacted me before to let me know they were about to stop following me, and gave a reason - which was nothing to do with anything in particular I’d tweeted.
But in this instance I chose to follow it up with Lachy … and as I expected his reason for ceasing to follow me was not about anything I said or an opinion I had expressed or a point of view he disagreed with.
It was simply a matter of adjusting, tweaking and configuring the flow or feed of information to suit availability, mood, interest and activities at a particular point in time.
And since then Lachy has followed and then unfollowed me at least once more. Some people who used to follow me have permanently stopped following me.
Twitter is only one communication channel you have with people you interact with. You use Twitter as an outgoing channel differently to how to talk to people over the phone, in groups, with friends, with co-workers, via SMS and via email; and the people on the receiving end of your channel receive information differently from how they might receive communication via other mediums. In some cases people just don’t want to be on the receiving end of that interaction with you via Twitter. Doesn’t impact how you interact with them in other ways (although if Twitter is the only communication channel you have with someone then you could be losing that relationship - although you then have to question how well you knew that person and how much you valued that connection).
lulz im all over ur feed
The most obvious example of this is where someone on Twitter who follows me only follows a total of five people. I’m a reasonably prolific tweeter, and when I view their “With Others” page and all I see is a page full of my tweets it makes me feel bad … and I entirely understand when they choose to stop following me. In fact I’d prefer if they did! There needs to be balance there.
But that’s an extreme example - and there a grades of communication saturation and other factors that may lead people to stop following you. Don’t take it personally. Perhaps the Twitter model of “followers” is broken - although I believe it’s an improvement over the original model they had of “friends”.
With RSS you don’t know when a particular person stops subscribing to your blog feed so you don’t have the opportunity to question why they’re no longer interested. I unsubscribed from LifeHacker yesterday because of the number of posts they publish every day. Doesn’t mean I don’t like LifeHacker - it just means that I’d prefer to go to the site when I choose to instead of having all the content delivered to my Google Reader.
Same with Twitter - people have different habits. Sometimes those habits change. Sometimes something that once worked for them works no longer as priorities change, situation changes and so on.
You’re just being silly
Don’t assume the worst - but if you’re still not convinced and can’t let it go then contact that person who’s stopped following you and ask why. They’ll probably just tell you to stop being silly, it was just a matter of them trimming their feed down because they’re too busy that week to keep on top of the aggregated feeds of 250 people or because you’re not tweeting on anything of interest to them that week or that they’d rather just stick to talking to you in person rather than via Twitter as a personal preference. All plausible and highly likely explanations.
May 30th, 2008 at 11:11 pm
Great post and very true. I used to feel a little down a long time ago with one of my blogs when I lost a subscriber or 20 from my feeds, but for the most part its simply people reducing noise and clutter, gaining and losing interests and adjusting what comes to them.
It’s nothing to fear, we all do it, even subconsciously in the world around us so we can sift through the immense amount of data and gain the information we require.
May 31st, 2008 at 1:37 am
Twitter doesn’t allow you to “pause” or “turn down the volume”. I also stopped following you when your twitter stream was flowing too fast for me.
I still use the web page version of twitter. I find apps like Twitterific too disruptive to my train of thought. I prefer to look at Twitter when I choose.
Some days my Twitter chatter threshold is higher than others
Definitely wouldn’t take it too personally.
May 31st, 2008 at 9:21 am
Some days/weeks I’m too busy to tweet - other days I have nothing better to do but surf the Net and share all the interesting links I stumble on via Twitter. I tweet differently on the weekend to how I do during the week. Differently to when I’m on holidays compared to when I’m at work. And (I won’t say “unfortunately”) Twitter provides no mechanism for filtering or categorising a Twitter stream so you either get ALL of someone’s tweets or none of them.
June 2nd, 2008 at 2:28 pm
I think this post should be mandatory reading for everyone using Twitter, I’ve already read about two snarky comments this week about people losing “followers” and taking it personally
June 9th, 2008 at 2:31 pm
Great summation and expansion of the points from our conversation, Nat. I actually had somebody get *really* cut with me the other week. He’d stopped using Twitter for over a month and then he’s pissed that I wasn’t following him anymore… I found that weird, but he found it weird that I’d ‘ditch’ him like that.
This is the issue with the loaded language most social networking sites use. It comes with social and cultural expectations. Twitter deliberately removed that language from their interface and yet they’re still tarred with the broader brush.
I’ll be pointing folks here for an explanation in future