How to decide who to unfollow on Twitter

Every once in a while, you have to break off a relationship with someone on Twitter. They get annoying, or boring, and you realize you're just not getting value from being in touch with them.

Until recently, I had a really bad system for deciding who to unfollow. I regularly checked FriendOrFollow.com, a tool for organizing your Twitter followers. I would look over their list of people who I followed, but who did not follow me back. These were people whose tweets I read, but they didn't read mine.

I'd check each name on that list, and decide whether to continue following them based on whether they were important enough for me to maintain the one-way relationship.

That sounds petty. And it was. I didn't want to be that guy anymore.

My new system is that as long as I'm enjoying reading someone's tweets, I'll continue to follow them. And if I'm not enjoying their tweets anymore, I unfollow them, even if they're following me.

Some people go crazy on the links, hashtags and abbreviations. Some of that is inevitable on Twitter, but some people overuse them to the point where messages are unreadable. Sometimes my Twitter stream seems filled with gobbledygook. When that happens, I get out the weed-whacker and unfollow people until my Twitter-stream becomes more comprehensible.

Some people make a point to go through their "Following" list and unfollow other people who haven't tweeted in a while. I've never seen the point of that. Why bother? If they're not tweeting, then they're not bothering you. Unfollowing them seems like a waste of time. Moreover, they might start tweeting again, and presumably you'll want to read their tweets then. You must have followed them for a reason.

Maybe the people who unfollow idle Twitter users are looking for busywork to keep themselves occupied while their minds wander. I totally get that impulse, but I think folding laundry or sorting pocket change would be just as effective and more productive too.

I rarely block anybody, unless they're spammers who @mention me. I don't care if the people who are following me are spammers, so long as I never see their spam. But @mentions show up in my Twitter stream. Once spammers get in my face like that, I block and report them.

Very rarely, I block someone who sends me hostile @mentions, trying to pick fights. I'm not interested in getting in fights with people on Twitter. I've done it a few times and felt sour afterward -- and for what? Arguing with people on social media is a colossal waste of time. As the saying goes: Never get in a spitting contest with a camel, you both get wet and the camel likes it.

And yes, I did use the word "Unfollow" in the headline to this blog. Somewhere, my 10th Grade English teacher, a lovely woman named Mrs. Colette Mayer, is weeping.