Recently I’ve been avoiding Twitter. I have reached just over 5000 followers and I’m following around the same number of people. I don’t spend all day looking at my twitterfeed and as such I miss most of the tweets from people I’m really interested in – my business’ target market, property and real estate website owners.

Are you mass marketing?

For many businesses, mass marketing isn’t needed, let alone viable. As such, in most cases it wouldn’t make sense to make conversation with a distributor of washing machines when trying to seal a deal for your all-in-one popcorn machine-cross-home cinema projector (why don’t we have these yet?)

To put it a better way, there’s no reason to follow everyone back who follows you if it means that you are going to miss tweets and conversations within your target market.

Taking the plunge

After my epiphany, I admit, I took the inefficient path. I trawled through my following list to unfollow everyone I wasn’t interested in. If you are following 200 or so people, it probably is easier to start this way. However, it can takes a long time with a list of thousands!

I took these actions to downsize and focus my following:

Don’t you care about all those you unfollowed?

You can’t follow everyone and talk to everyone. I’m using twitter to connect with my target market and give them advice in my area of expertise. I can’t converse with and track thousands of people, many of whom don’t interest me. Sorry.

There are some considerations though. In a blog post, Gerald Weber talks about how mass unfollowing is a bad idea. I only concluded it was still a good idea when I realised Gerald has used Tweetdeck’s groups feature to effectively categorise his contacts while building his following. Having not built up groups from the start, I feel I need to start a fresh with my following to even find the users I want to put into groups.

A large influence for this idea Niel Wiser at Twitip who writes about how Ari Herzog sorted out his following list while keeping his followers informed.

My Following Policy

I think everyone should have a following policy. Flicking on the auto-follow and building your follower list into the thousands can be a lot less effective than interacting with a small group of several hundred targeted followers.

Please don’t feel offended if I don’t follow you back or if I unfollow you. If I really do want to interact with you then I will follow you and devote every bit of attention to what you have to say; it would be an injustice not to. Therefore I will only follow people who I feel relate to my interests.

On Twitter, I am looking to network with professionals in the field of internet marketing, gain new business in real estate and property and learn more about the field, mentor and advise property website owners and to learn new professional techniques for internet marketing. If you wish to follow, I am @eitri.

On LinkedIn, I wish to connect with property website owners, gain new business and offer advice through LinkedIn groups. If you wish to connect, my name is Calum Dickinson.