Cleaning Out Your Twitter: The No Return Love Split

You've done your due dilligence and searching and following and you feel like you need to do a little cleanup of your Twitter account. And by cleanup, I mean removing followers.

Wha-what? Why would anyone want to remove followers? I'll go into that in another post, but suffice it to say it's like a breakup: they're hounding you, they've changed, they're not what you thought, or they're ignoring you. It's time for a clean split.

Let's take that last one. You are being ignored. By that, I mean you have followed someone and they are simply not following you back. It's been weeks or months even and part of the Twitter experience is giving love back. (note: if you're following celebrities and they are adding value to your daily tweet reading, they're - by definition - exempt from this)

So how can you tell if someone's not following you, ignoring your original follow notice? It's quite simple:

• Log into your Twitter account through the twitter.com website.


• On your home page, click the "following" link to view people who you are following.


• Anyone who you cannot send a direct message to is not following you.


• Clean out that trash.

Oh, what? No. Hold on, now. Calm down. I know. I know. Numbers are important to you and you following many people gives your life meaning. But wouldn't you rather be spending time following people who are following you? Isn't that more valuable? More meaningful?

Hey, don't look at it as a severing of a relationship. They weren't following you, right? Look at it as cleaning out the garage or the fridge, as nature culls a herd.

The definition of winnow is to separate the grain from the chaff. Get rid of that chaff. You'll have a leaner, more powerful Twitter account for it.