Saturday 20 November 2010

Hour #9 : Shedding Your Online Friends And Follow Lists

As someone whose business is social media shedding online friends could be seen as dangerous.

Could I be losing valuable contacts and / or shedding potential fruitful business relationships?

Then again, I'm all too aware of the issue surrounding 'signal vs noise' online and ensuring filtering methods are in place to ensure you get the good stuff only.

Therefore, this decluttering project needs to extend into all aspects of my life and online friends / follow lists are no exceptions.

The main focus for this exercise are Facebook and Twitter.

The approach for unfollowing / unfriending people has been simple :
  • those I haven't spoken to (in person / on the phone / skype / email) in over 6 months
  • people who offer no discernible value (ie education / inform)
  • anyone who is not a client
  • inactive accounts

The total on Facebook has gone from 552 friends down to 424—achieved by simply going through my whole friends list.

Twitter total has shrunk from 750+ to 496—achieved over the past couple of months by using the Chump Dump iPhone App and being critical of my decision to follow anyone.

Maybe Dunbars Number is about 450 for me?

How have you decluttered your online spaces / friends list?

Image credit

2 comments:

  1. I actually left Facebook and created a new account with less than 100 friends. I write about it on my post: How To Maximize Your Facebook Usage By Doing Less. As for Twitter - I left it. It was great. I only started again recently because I wanted to share my blog posts and only follow about 30 people. I'm one of those people that doesn't like to be online too often other than to read blog posts, so social networking is something I don't want to invest much time in.

    Congratulations on your decluttering process! I'm going to subscribe to your RSS feed and I look forward to reading about your experience!

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  2. LM - thanks for your comment and encouragement. Great to here about your success in dwindling your 'friends' online or even leaving the spaces all together (something harder for me to do as social media is my profession). Thanks for grabbing the feed and done the same for yours :-)

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