Over the years, my Twitter followed list had become somewhat cluttered… Just over 4,000 accounts – the usual mixture of friends, family, colleagues, partners, thought leaders, brands and celebrities. I’d had a few occasional cleanups, but put it this way, it was becoming difficult to see the wood for the trees. The signal to noise ratio had become pretty awful, and most of the value I was seeing from Twitter came through the search terms I used in Tweetdeck columns, rather than from my timeline. Thankfully, I’d never been a Twitter completionist, as quite frankly there was no way I had a hope of coming close in the past couple of years!
So what to do?
Reboot.
Put quite simply, it was time to start again.
So as of this morning, I’ve unfollowed every single account that I was was following:
How did I do that? Well here’s the trick. Open up your following list in Google Chrome, and scroll all the way to the bottom. It currently loads 12 accounts at a time, so in my case I had to keep scrolling for a long time. Then open the Chrome Javascript Console, and enter the following jQuery command:
$('.user-actions-follow-button').click()
Leave it to run for a few seconds, and you’ll see that every single ‘following’ button gets toggled back to ‘follow’. Of course, if you wanted to just unfollow a sub-section of accounts, you could search for them and then run the command.
So what now?
My plan is to follow Luis Suarez’s example, and to start using lists in a big way to manage my Twitter use, and to allocate each to a column in my Tweetdeck dashboard. I know this isn’t exactly revolutionary, but do think it will force me to be more selective over whom I let enhance/pollute my timeline, and thus my attention. At the same time, I’ve opened up my DM preferences to allow anyone to direct message me even though I’m not following them…
I’ll let you know how it goes!