Twitter Etiquette: Why did you unfollow me?

On a regular basis I will check on my Twitter account to see updates of new followers I have.  Sometimes I pay attention to the actual numbers but not often.  By coincidence I was writing some content for one of our courses on Bots and their effect on the number of followers you will and will not have on any given day.  While I was writing that I was refreshing my Twitter site and saw that my own numbers went down by 3 within that 20 minute period.  Not that this was a real big deal to me but at the same time it left me wondering for a moment, was it something I said or was it the bots.  I don’t have any of those tools for tracking who unfollowed me so I really don’t know the answer.  But it got me thinking of some other comments I have heard from others from time to time on something similar that has happened to them.  I did some investigating on a couple of the accounts that unfollowed or even blocked fellow tweeters and this is what I found.

When I looked at their ratio of who they were following, versus their followers, there was a huge gap.  So imagine this scenario.  A Twitter user has 100 people that follow them and they only follow back 20 people.  Now in those 20 people you have maybe one or two regular tweeters.  What do you think the user’s Twitter stream is going to look like?  Of course it will be filled with those couple of tweeters who are active on Twitter which will then lend to their opinion that all they see on Twitter is them…hence perhaps this is the reason for the unfollow.

I believe this to be bad etiquette, but don’t get offended; the next couple of paragraphs are going to help.  Twitter is about community.  This tool will do little to help you in your daily process if you open an account, find a couple of friends who have accounts via the email suggestion tool and then stop there.  There are hundreds and hundreds of multifamily professionals who use Twitter every day.  So if you do not want your stream to look like only one person is posting something all the time, it’s time for you to reach out.

Twitter lists have helped solve this outreach for you.  I am going to post a couple here and then for the readers of this post if you have any lists you want to share, feel free to post below in the comments section.  These lists once you click through on them you will find endless multifamily users to help build your community.

Of course I will start with mine    http://twitter.com/trainingfactor/multifamily (383 listed)

The Ellipse group has a nice list as well  http://twitter.com/TheEllipseCow/multifamily (416 listed)

Charity Hisle list http://twitter.com/CharityHisle/multifamily (404 listed)

Turn Social list http://twitter.com/TurnSocial/multifamily (407 listed)

There are others as well but I will let them post in the comments section if they wish.

You will not regret building your community.  This industry does nothing but set the tone for what it means to help one another.  So don’t unfollow.  Don’t block.  Build!

Written by Jonathan Saar