Good and Bad Reasons to #Unfollow on Twitter

The other day I noticed this tweet from Debbie Akers (@momx3deb):

I don’t unfollow people for no reason. I’m pretty easy to get along with. But if you make fun of disabled people in your tweets, I’m done.

That’s what I’d call a good reason to unfollow someone: You choose not to deliberately expose yourself to haters.

Here’s another one by Shehla Rashid (@ShehlaRashid):

Some wannabe celebs on Twitter have no PR skills, won’t engage with their followers, write stupid tweets and expect RTs. #Unfollow

I agree, Shehla; someone like that is very annoying, even if he or she doesn’t say stupid things. Who wants to receive RT requests from someone who never talks to you otherwise?

And then there’s the ultimate unfollow reason by Shannah Daisy (@Shannah_xo):

Your tweets make me want to jump off the top of a bridge #unfollow

But if you follow the hashtag #unfollow, you’ll find all sorts of bad reasons for unfollowing, usually tweeted by people who don’t really understand the way Twitter works. Here are some examples. (I didn’t quote these because there’s no reason to criticize the people by name.)

You unfollow any professional who tweets about politics because you “don’t think professionals should do that.” There is no network less “all business, all the time” than Twitter. If you insist on surrounding your Twitter stream with a cocoon of biz bots, you’re only hurting yourself.

You unfollow celebrities who don’t follow you back. Do you actually like this celebrity, or were you just hoping that he or she would read your tweets? If you like this celebrity, what does it matter if he or she talks to you on Twitter? Are their tweets any less entertaining if they don’t follow you back?

You unfollow people who don’t tweet very much/ Okay, this is just plain weird. Twitter isn’t charging you per follow and there’s no “follow limit.” How on earth could it be annoying if someone doesn’t clog up your timeline with tweets?

You unfollow people who don’t reply to your @ mentions. ONCE. Maybe you only want to follow non-celebrity people who converse with you. That’s fine, but get a realistic view of how busy some people’s streams and mention pages can get. No one scans Twitter every second of every day. Try to reach them again before you decide that they’re unresponsive.

You unfollow people who never retweet YOU. If that’s your attitude, no wonder your tweets aren’t all that.

Do you have examples of good and bad reasons to unfollow? Share them in the comments! I’ll end with one final good reason to unfollow by Cedi Carias (@c3diii):

do not remember why im following some people on here