Unintentionally pointless

I’ve been having a bit of a clear out both IRL and even more so on social media… I thought you might be interested in some of what I’ve learnt from the latter.

Clearing out Twitter

I had completely lost track of the number of random or irrelevant twitter accounts I had chosen to follow. I can’t explain how it got to that. A large number were apparently not used very much. A large number weren’t following me back. Unintentionally pointless.

A massive clear out ensued and a few things have struck me as a consequence…

• I now like my timeline much better both on mobile and PC.
• I now don’t need to use lists at all.
• Accounts that annoy me or don’t seem relevant really stand out now.
• New accounts I’ve followed are more interesting and tangential to what I do.

I’ve probably unfollowed close to 2,000 accounts and I’m now at a very happy and meaningful following just under 950.  My sense is that is still plenty and I wouldn’t be surprised if it reduces further.

So what have I learnt?

• It’s easy to get in a mess following people you just don’t need to follow.
• Intimacy is the only way you can assess quality/relevance.
• There’s real value in high quality tangential connections.
• I have an eclectic range of professional interests!

By the way… Over the last year I’ve been looking at my twitter statistics. I thought a few key metrics should give me some insight into how I’m landing. It doesn’t really at all. Not new learning but I thought I’d share!

Clearing out Blogs I follow

Over the last couple of months I’ve started to unfollow some of the more popular blogs in my network. I’d noticed that I’d often find myself reading them via Twitter first then finding them again in my WordPress reader stream. Unintentionally pointless.

In doing so I started to realise there were quite a few blogs that I followed on WordPress that were dead or dormant. At some point in the past something interesting had been written on them so I’d followed them but they’d not continued and I’d never reviewed or had a clear out.

In all there were 175 blogs. Yes, 175…

I took a couple of hours to go through them all and unfollow those that were clearly dead , deleted or had moved elsewhere. At the same time I took note of the date of the last post or if the blog had been deleted or moved elsewhere. As geeky as it sounds it didn’t add much extra to the process and the results were quite interesting I think.

Ignoring those that were deleted or moved, there were 140 blogs left of which only half had been used in the last 13 months. Even then, of those where there were posts last year but not yet this year I had a sense that at least half again may have said their last…

Nothing wrong in that. We choose to blog what we want, when we want for whatever purpose we choose as long as it suits us well.

It’s just fascinating to me that at least 50% of blogs I’d followed were “no longer” and only something in the order of 25% had endured. It doesn’t tell me what the lifetime of a blog might be but it does suggest that many dip their toe for only a while.

So what have I learnt?

• Never follow a frequent blogger in my network, it’s overkill.
• It’s good to have a broad and eclectic range of blogs to follow.

Hope that’s been useful to share.