Twitter Downsizing (And A Request)

On September 9, 2012, in Blogging, Mea Culpa, Twitter, by rsguthrie

For those of you who are down on me bloggin’ so much, don’t worry—I’ve decided to back off to Friday Blogs only unless there’s something fairly important I want to say (like this). By the way, next week is Molly on Writing, a brilliant guest post by super-blogger Molly Greene you are not going to want to miss!

On to the subject of this blog. I have decided it’s time in the path to downsize my Twitter following. My “main” stream is completely useless and it’s getting too hard to keep adding (and deleting) people from my “Important Tweets” list. So I am not trying to be an egomaniac, and I know I am going to lose some followers doing this, which is fine (if you’re only following me because I’m following you, you’re a TWIT, and not in the social media vernacular).

The main point of this blog is one easy way to reach my friends, fellow writers, fans, etc. that if you wake up and suddenly notice I’m not following you anymore, don’t hate me, or panic, or ever worry in the slightest. Comment here or email me or tweet me and I will IMMEDIATELY add you back (unless I don’t have any idea who your psycho ass is).

What I did come up with, however, is a good list everyone should have for setting up their Twitter account, tweets you send, etc. This way readers do get something out of this short blog. 🙂

1. Don’t be an egg. I’m unfollowing all eggs and when I occasionally run across an egg friend I politely tell him or her to man up and put up a picture of SOMETHING. Seriously. Number one priority after creating account: lose the egg.

2. Use Twitcleaner.com once in a while. I had to abuse it a bit this week (taking no prisoners, so to speak). They list good friends and peers (including me) in some of their “questionable” categories—in my case because I tweet so much for others I get some flags for dupe tweets, too many @’s, etc. You really want to take some time with your report (Twitcleaner will run the report and then DM you when it’s ready). I used to only delete bots and people that hadn’t been on Twitter since Lucy was still humping Desi, but you get the point. You can easily target deadbeat accounts, etc. on there and keep your following list fairly clean. (I had to write this because I know some of you dolphins were swept up in my tuna nets—I just need YOU to tell me if it happened to your account).

3. Take a bath once in a while. Nah, just kidding on this one. Except Scott Morgan, but his punk ass never reads my blogs anyway. Fucking elitist snob.

In closing, seriously, hit me up if I unfollowed you and you think I need to hear what you have to say. Or if we’re just friends. Or by all means if you are a FAN of my books. I love hearing what my fans are thinking, so PLEASE HIT ME UP. I didn’t unfollow you on purpose. Well, I did, but it was only because it was easier to do mass, sweeping deletes and I want you back.

My fans are my lifeblood, you know that. I dedicated my second book to you. Yes, YOU.

Each singularly-awesome one of you. 🙂

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The blank page is dead…long live the blank page.

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Author known to use spontaneous satire, sarcasm, and unannounced injections of pith or witticisms which may not be suitable for humorless or otherwise jest-challenged individuals. (Witticisms not guaranteed to be witty, funny, comical, hilarious, clever, scintillating, whimsical, wise, endearing, keen, savvy, sagacious, penetrating, fanciful, or otherwise enjoyable. The Surgeon General has determined through laboratory testing that sarcasm can be dangerous, even in small amounts, and should not be ingested by those who are serious, somber, pensive, weighty, funereal, unsmiling, poker-faced, sober, or pregnant.)

 

9 Responses to Twitter Downsizing (And A Request)

  1. Caleb Pirtle says:

    It’s better to tweet with a rifle shot to those who really count than use a scatter gun on those who don’t know and don’t care.

  2. Jo VonBargen says:

    Yay, Molly!! One of my true favs! Can’t wait to see how ole bud Scott retaliates! lol I’ll be waiting here in my armchair, popcorn in hand.

  3. Does the fact that I click through just about all of your links help my cause at all? I’ve been trying to decide on blocking those “E-Z-Cash” type twits. Will twitcleaner grab them?

    • rsguthrie says:

      Goods question; I don’t provide links for any other reason
      Than the original one: to give the reader an easy way to get to something they might want to check outv. I don’t even know enough about “click-throughs” to know if you just insulted me. 🙂

      Twitcleaner will tell you WHO looks suspicious (e.g. repeating same URLs, spam type behavior, ones they think are a bot or use “advertising” networks, etc.). You have to make the decision whether to unfollow (and there’s a limit -like 500 per day). TC does it “slowly, like Twitter likes” so leave it on the page once you’ve begun unfollowing; I’ve never figured out if leaving the page kills the process but I think it does.

      It’s a great free tool (and in case you WERE wondering I know enough to know I’m not getting anything from TC for recommending, talking about them, or linking to them. 🙂

  4. Since Lucy was humping Desi. Classic.

  5. Jon Mills says:

    You took me back 2 years ago when I had over 15,000 followers. I then wiped every single sucker off the list. Not because I wanted them all gone but because I couldn’t find the gold through the dross. It was just an endless stream of promotions and not that I mind that, as we all will do that but finding good, useful, interesting tweets by people who were actually interesting was just a nightmare.

    It reminds me of email promotions. You don’t need 10,000 people on your subscriber list. You only need 100 who are interested in what you have to say. All the rest are just taking up space and costing you money from your autoresponder service.

    Yes I could have created a list for all the interesting ones but I have enough things to check each day as it is 😉

    I really keep my twittering down to a few minutes a day

    And no doubt a year from now I will do it again, hit the kill button and obliterate everyone.

    There really is a fine line between wanting to find people who might be interested in your stuff, finding those are interesting and finding all the nobs who are just spamming the crap out of you or telling you about what they ate last night.

    • rsguthrie says:

      I took YOU back? You mean, after you deleted your account (and is that what you mean, because the only way to get rid of FOLLOWERS is by getting rid of your account or blocking/spamming them, right?)? And AMEN to having enough to take away from WRITING every day. In fact, what am I doing chit-chatting here with you…? 😀

  6. Mary says:

    I recently condensed to one website. Downsizing can be a good move.

    • rsguthrie says:

      Ironically I just had my rsguthrie.com website redesigned by professionals (not quite live yet; cutting over soon). Because it wasn’t great before (you can still see it here http://www.rsguthrie.com, I have basically been working off this blog site. Now that will be fully incorporated into rsguthrie.com so yep, one-stop shopping (even a COOL page-flipping reader I had them build for me to put sample chapters in! 🙂

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