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January 14th, 2009
What makes you unfollow someone? Six things stand out.
in: Communicate
How many people can we follow? Take a look at this excellent study by Huberman, Romero, and Wu. It shows that there’s an underlying hidden network of friends, and that the remaining follower/followee relationships are really just social courtesy. If humans can normally handle around 150 social relationships then, as JP Rangaswami observes, tools like Twitter help push this limit up to perhaps 600 people. Of course, it depends a lot on your intensity and focus on the people you’re following. People like Chris Brogan say they handle Twitter at scale, but that’s a full-time job. The rest of us eventually have to resort to automation to handle a large community. Lots of new vendors are launching tools to collect information from various social networks and online communities, then consolidate the results. They’re doing search, tag clouds, and visualization to help a marketer or community manager grok the zeitgeist of the folks in their community. Getting your mind around what thousands of people are thinking is no small trick. But responding to those results is another thing entirely–one that’s also starting to emerge from technology companies (though most of these firms are still in stealth.) Unfortunately, by using these kinds of tools we invariably make our responses sound like form letters, which turns off our audience, encouraging them to stop paying attention to us. In the web economy, we spend a lot of time on acquisition of attention. But we spend far less on avoiding departure. For users who reach the social network saturation point, unfollows, unsubscribes, and the occasional mailing list spring cleaning are inevitable. Twitter’s a good lab for this kind of thing. It’s trivially easy to follow or unfollow someone, and they don’t know you’re doing it immediately. Since the follow/unfollow mechanism is virtually frictionless, it’s a decent proxy for other social sites like RSS subscriptions and Facebook groups. Based on my (admittedly unscientific) study, there are six main things that make people unfollow you. So — we need unfollow tracking, and we need to correlate it to the interactions we had before the unfollow. With that kind of analytics we can understand which behaviors undermine our social efforts. In the real world, my wife kicks me under the table when I’m being a bore (and yes, I have heavily bruised shins.) Online, we don’t have the luxury of quick feedback.Social networking for business is a two-edged sword: You have to keep track of many followers, but automating the process thwarts efforts to remain genuine. And yet we don’t spend enough time analyzing unfollow behavior. Here are the results of some informal surveys over the past few weeks.
How many people can we really follow?
Automation of community interactions
What drives unfollowing?

Tags: Social Networks, Twitter, Unfollow
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