Despite having been on Twitter for over 8 years now, I don’t consider myself very good at it. The majority of my tweets are re-tweets of others, or blog posts that automatically post to Twitter (which most of the time I forget to hashtag so no one sees them anyway).
I only have 510 followers right now while writing this post, and I only follow 448 people. And I rarely feel the need to go to Twitter just to see what those people I follow are tweeting about. Like most of my social media outlets, Twitter is just used to fill or kill time. I’m sure it’s a good promotional tool for some, but like I said, I’m not good at it. I’m always amazed when I come across someone who I don’t know and they have 10,000+ followers on Twitter and they only follow like 400. Who are these people??
I like using the site called Who Unfollowed Me from time to time just to see came or went. Unfollowers don’t hurt my feelings, and if I was following them I usually repay with an unfollow.
Until last year, I followed mostly authors. The majority were indie authors. My Twitter feed had a “buy my book” feel to it though where everyone promoted their own books or retweeted others promoting their books, but since everyone was an author I seriously doubt any books were getting bought. Kind of a you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours pyramid kinda thing where no one probably got a sale or really benefited from it.
I always give a smirk when I see a poor indie author follow me now. I rarely follow them back, and a few days or weeks later they usually end up unfollowing me. The same goes for those “businessmen” who want to help you promote or market yourself and they tweet every hour about the “Top 3 Things You Need to Do to Get More Followers” or “Top Tags to Use to Improve Your Social Media” and so on. They always want you to sign up for their email newsletter and there’s always some free Ebook available.
I follow a lot of comedians now since that’s what I’m into, especially those that use Twitter to poke fun at themselves or to poke fun at the news or media or whatever is the hot Twitter topic of the day. It makes me laugh and helps make Twitter still fun to use and visit.
And yeah, I even followed Donald Trump up until about two weeks ago. Like so many others, I was quick to lash out at his tweets with a snarky comment, but then it just got old. So I unfollowed him, knowing that others will certainly fill that void by retweeting his tweets and commenting on them. Or just watch the news, they scrutinize every one of his tweets every day!