I’ve spent an hour today (Thursday) on deleting all the non-personal accounts I’m following on Twitter. While the cognitive load due to hundreds of new posts per hour was extremely high, I also want to shift my usage of social media a bit.
Back when it all started for me in the early 2000s social media meant real people. I followed primarily friends and coworkers in order to learn about the latest news and trends. Eventually, every company and product-line got their own Twitter account and, easy as it was, I simply followed them too. Before taking out the garden shears today I was following around 750 accounts on Twitter and there were at least 100 posts per hour appearing in my timeline which made the whole thing a huge stress-factor to the point where I simply ignored Twitter altogether.
Now I wanted to try something new: I want to use social media primarily to talk with people and get their opinion instead of opinion-by-marketing or opinion-by-committee. Groups, products, companies, magazines, newspapers should all have RSS feeds people can subscribe to.
It took me quite some time but with a couple of exceptions (mostly by accident) I’ve now unfollowed all non-personal accounts and trimmed my following-list down by around 320 accounts!
Let’s see if this makes Twitter useful to me again 🙂
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