How I Lost Over 1,300 Twitter Followers Overnight

The other day, I had the bright idea of cleaning up my Twitter feed a bit. Unfortunately, I may have inadvertently cleaned up things a bit too much as I went to bed having over 14,000 followers and woke up to only 12,700… It's not unusual for me to gain a hundred or more NEW followers each day, so losing this many Twitter followers overnight was a bit of a shock. Here is the one thing you should avoid if you don't want to lose followers.

How I Lost 1,300 Followers Overnight

I had been using the following method to grow my social media presence. Follow others, and they'll often follow you back. This is a way to ping them, and then oftentimes, if they like your page, they'll end up following you back. I stopped using this method some time back as I found that it leads to followers who don't care about your stuff, but it is effective for growing your vanity numbers.

Anyway, I was tired of seeing all the junk in my feed, so the other day, I unfollowed everyone. It was much easier than trying to sort through the thousands of people I had followed one by one. The one thing I didn't really count on was the fact that many people take notice when you unfollow them. While I didn't intend to offend anyone, many may have seen it that way, and I probably had a few people following me that were automated to follow back.

Overnight, my follower count dropped off a cliff.

Oops…

If you care about your Twitter follower count, don't unfollow your followers! My feed is much cleaner on a positive note, so if you want a usable feed, maybe it's worth it!