5 ways not to lose followers on Twitter

When I was cleaning up my Twitter account recently, I clicked on an analytics button I hadn’t used before. It showed me the number of people who recently unfollowed me.

What I saw made me gasp:

First, let’s state the obvious. No, I’m not going to tweet that.

Second, let’s put this situation in perspective.

I currently have about 60,000 followers on Twitter. To the best of my knowledge, all of them are real people. They found and stuck with me over the last four years. This graphic implies that in just a few months nearly 100,000 people found and dropped me.

My initial reaction was, “Whoa. Do I really suck that badly?”

The unfollow phenomenon

No, I am not that sucky, and neither are you.

No one could possibly suck at Twitter so badly that 100,000 people followed and then dropped him moments later. Even Guy Kawasaki has kept people around his account while tweeting about socks and the sex life of plants.

So, what is going on here?

There are a lot of people out there who game the system or try to look cool by getting a lot of people to follow them while they follow few in return. They try to look like a celebrity who is so in demand they can’t keep up with their fans.