Why I Just Spent the Last Hour Unfollowing You

Does this ever happen to you? You’re quietly minding your own business when something interesting flies under your radar. You have a look and a think and carry on merrily with your day. A little while later another ‘something interesting’ related to the first ‘something interesting’ comes to your attention. When this then happens for a third time, what do you do?

I happened to be browsing the home feed of Twitter this afternoon when a headline caught my attention: Are You Risking Twitter Account Suspension? My brother-in-law had expressed concerns last week about Give A Brick sending out a lot of links to this blog so, given that I’m still just learning to walk when it comes to Twitter, I decided to check this article out.

An hour later I happened across one of my favourite blogs and decided to browse the archives to see what I’d missed out on. With Twitter still on my mind, I went for Twitter Followers – Quality or Quantity? The general consensus seemed to be that both was preferable

I’ve been playing with Twitter since the latter past of last year. In the early days I did nothing but chat and build relationships. More recently I’ve also been experimenting with using Twitter to showcase the charity and the various articles we write. Seeing as none of these articles are trying to sell you anything and they’re all written with the intention of encouraging and warming your heart, I didn’t see much wrong with this shift in usage.

However, whilst I still don’t see anything wrong in sharing our posts with you (after all, according to Twitter’s own published rules, that’s why it was created) I’ve decided to stop automatically following anyone who follows me. It will mean a little more time but any time someone does us the honour of deciding that they’d like to see what Give A Brick is tweeting about, I will be logging in and manually checking to see that they really do want to communicate. Spammers be warned

To that end, I have just spent the last 90 minutes going through the people who currently follow Give A Brick. The profile pictures with logos rather than real people’s faces were my first port of call. I un-followed anyone who just tweeted adverts, anyone who merely tweeted articles from a directory and absolutely anyone who tweeted that wonderful teeth whitening ad more than once I’m not done yet but you can imagine how tedious it got

A little while ago I read an interesting discussion about how the DM (direct message) could be used to good effect. This whole discussion is currently rendered obsolete since the majority of people ignore their DM inbox thanks to all the spam. Whilst Give A Brick may only have a small number of followers (621 at the time of writing) and we don’t know anybody famous (except the lovely @StephenFry but who doesn’t know him and besides, he’s currently locked away writing his book) the purpose of this post is to implore you to think about how you use Twitter. What are the best bits for you and how could it be better?

Be the change you want to see in the world - Mahatma Gandhi

This is one of my favourite quotes (and having quoted it today for the second time in less that 48 hours, I promise not to use it again for at least 7 days ) but could you and I be the change we’d like to see in Twitter?

Over to you. What do you think?

Please add a comment and retweet.
It’s just another one of the ways you can Give A Brick and then tell your friends

photo credit: @cdharrison

Give A Brick works to support children, young people, the elderly and those experiencing financial hardship. If you enjoyed this post, please Give A Brick (just £1 ) then ask your friends to do the same.

Give A Brick is a UK registered charity #1121744