Twitter: Why I Have Stopped Following Back EVERYONE

Knowledge is power, and Twitter helps you gain that with only 140 characters. Effective? Yes. But gleaning useful information from the useless ones that appear on your Twitter feed can be really troublesome sometimes, especially if you're following 1,000 people at once.

I joined Twitter in 2010. Unlike most users, my intention was to just check out how the platform actually worked. By that time I had become an avid user of Facebook and I had been posting long status updates and playing games whenever I had the time. For me, a platform that used something called hashtags and allowed micro-message-exchanging appeared quite fascinating to me. So I quickly went ahead and got myself an account.

Up until 2012, I did not have a theme for my Twitter. I used it to follow celebs and occasionally retweet stuff. But then I started to take writing seriously, and I went on to follow some of my favorite authors on Twitter. My bio mentioned it clearly that I was a Freelance Writer, which I think the writing community took notice.

I have been using Twitter continuously since then. Currently I have 1,883 tweets with 496 followers. I follow 414 people.

See how I mentioned the number of my followers first? That's what most people on Twitter aim for, and that's what I am going to talk about today.

So, after I started following authors and posting about my blog, a couple of writers followed me on Twitter. I looked at their profiles to find a common interest between us. Again, there was this pressure on me to follow them back, because they had visited my profile and had been kind enough to follow me, and I felt obliged to follow them back. It made me look polite.

Afterwards, I started getting messages in my inbox. The people I had followed back were asking me to purchase their books on Amazon, and some of them offered me free copies. Amazon does not have operation in our country for Kindle books published in the US, and I had to politely refuse their offers.

Everything seemed okay till then, but when I looked at my Twitter feed, I could not find anything useful. There were thousands of tweets posted everyday about how I should read this book on Amazon that's available for $0.99 and new releases and the likes. I do not have anything against Indie publishers or self-published books, but I did not have any interest in them since I did not have the means to give those books a try.

It's then when I discovered the efficient use of Twitter lists. I took one day out of my schedule and sought out the accounts that actually catered to my taste and had useful information for me (writing tips, advice, and effective use of social media). I have been adding more people/accounts to them ever since, and I go straight to those lists after logging in to Twitter.

All the other tweets from the people I followed over the years get ignored by me, daily. Now the question is, what's the point of following all those people, then?

Facebook works by fueling our narcissism, we all know about it; but I am not sure what people's motives are when they start growing their Twitter follower list. I believe that Twitter is a place where you come to share news and learn a little more about the world you are living in, and communication is necessary. If you are going to have a bunch of people follow your account who do not have any interest in your tweets whatsoever, it kind of beats the purpose.

That is precisely why I took a bold step this year, and decided to stop following back anyone and everyone who follows me, no matter how guilty and rude I seem. I believe that those who follow me should do so because they have interest in my tweets. Yes, I am not a famous celebrity and the only thing I can provide to the mass are my humble attempts at writing stories that I have published on Wattpad. If anyone is interested to learn about my updates, they should follow me. I also retweet my favorite authors from time to time, so there's that as well. People should not follow me because they want me to follow them back and grow their follower list, but because they have the intention of communication with my account.

I know that I might not get a million followers on my Twitter, but I am completely fine with it. I only check my lists anyway, and will continue to do so no matter how many followers I have. For me, Twitter is a source of information, and not another platform to grow a base of followers who couldn't care less about me.

Image credit: Twitter.com
Also read: The Struggle Against Social Media: My Life Without Facebook