Why I have Decided to Delete My Twitter Account

10th November 2009

I have Trashed my Twitter Account

I have been on Twitter with the Twitter ID of @inetengineers for just over a year now and Tweet regularly on a daily basis, however I have now decided to delete the account. Read on to learn why.

When I first started Tweeting, like most folk new to the concept; the novelty of it all made me a bit giddy and I thought the idea of amassing as many followers as possible was the key to success. So in the initial months I adopted every strategy I could lay my hands on in order to build up a follower base.

Techniques I used included:

Auto-following everyone who began to follow me using tools like Socialoomph (formally called Tweetlater)
Manually following every Tom, Dick and Harry who chose to ‘follow me’.
Randomly following people en mass irrespective of who or where they were, with tools such as www.buzzom.com
Asking people to follow me just for the sake of it through sites like wefollow.com
Using various Facebook groups to find other, similar thinking people who were looking to boost their followers for no apparent reason!

The end result is that I quickly reached the best part of 1500 followers with me following some 1200 people in return under my @inetengineers account.

Too Much Noise

So far so good you may think; so what’s the problem?

Well the problem is one one of “noise” and “relevancy”.

Too Much Twitter Noise

Yes I may have a shed load of people I am following and vice versa, but to be quite frank; out of that lot, there’s probably only a few that I am actually interested in. The rest just create “chatter” and because there’s so many of them, there’s a lot of noise generated in my Twitter stream.

Even using a Twitter client such as Hootsuite that allows me to group my Tweeters together into ‘groups’, thus making it easier to separate the ‘wheat from the chaff’ and see what’s being talked about; quite frankly it’s still too difficult to disseminate the Tweets of the people I am interested in from the general populous.

Added to this, because of the tactics I naively used in my early Tweeting days; the majority of the the people I follow are completely irrelevant to me when it comes to my target location for my business, target interest groups and target industries! In a word useless!

So it’s time for a clear out! A plan of action that sounds good in theory but in practice, is harder to deploy when there’s over 1100 Twitter accounts to trawl through. It’s not something that can be done manually.

Drastic Steps

So I’ve decided to take drastic action and use the opportunity of a brand refresh for my business to iNet inSights from iNet Engineers to set-up a new Twitter account and delete my current @inetengineers Twitter account.

I’ll be carrying over my favourite Tweeters to my new account which will be used to follow a very selective group of people that I plan to interact with in the future.

Yes the numbers will be significantly lower, however this way I can be sure of giving my followers the attention they deserve. After all, as I have learnt; success with Twitter is all about “quality” not “quantity”.

Follow me with new Twitter ID at @inetinsights.

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Tags: Twitter

7 Comments

Helen Stothard Says:

This just goes to prove what I have said all along with Twitter, its all about quality not quantity. That being said I am not saying it in a “told you so” voice.

There are many mistakes made along the way in setting up a business, or social media campaign, and I think the important thing is to learn from them.

You have acknowledged the problem, come up with a solution and good luck to you.

Not sure if I will remain on the list of people you follow, but then I would only want to be on there if I thought it brought either value or entertainment to you, not just because I was a “number” used to hit a target.

Good luck.

10th November 2009
Alison Bannister Says:

It’s easy to get worked up about the numbers of followers you do or don’t especially if you use Twitter for business. But as you point out if you follow tons of people you just get information overload.

My policy is to only follow people of interest, I don’t follow someone just because they are following me.

I am now following you at your new Twitter ID as you tweet interesting & useful info, so thanks

10th November 2009
Leo Borj Says:

So, you are suffering twitter-promiscuity. I also think you took the right choice. start from the beginning and build a person to person interaction database.

10th November 2009
Jaimie Dobson Says:

Thanks Guys – some fine points. And yes Helen – I’ll keep an eye on your Tweets

10th November 2009
m a longbottom Says:

Without repeating – you are right – there’s always those nerdy stats like 99% of tweets by 1% of the twitter accounts. Which doesn’t matter as you know building relationships is more important than numbers.

All social media needs to be looked at on a specific person or business functionality as whats best for one isn’t for another.

Good to use http://friendorfollow.com which provides those people you are following but not who have not followed back. Gives people the opportunity to easliy find and unfollow thoe just looking for high follower stats.

One final point, always important to get reaction and interaction with constructive debate.

11th November 2009
m a longbottom Says:

just like to say the profile image next to my comment isn’t me?

11th November 2009
Jaimie Dobson Says:

The same message seems to be coming across with everyone in this thread: “quality not quantity”.

Good call!

BTW: Who is the pic of then Mark?

11th November 2009