support - TheWayoftheWeb

Two Facebook milestones reached…

When I started creating my own blogs and websites, I always set up Facebook pages and links as an element of good practice, but that’s been about it. Despite preaching about delivering valuable content, engaging in conversation etc, they’ve been left while I concentrated on building effective social media practices for the various companies (and now clients) which I’ve worked for…

So it was a nice and somewhat surprising boost to see first TheWayoftheWeb on Facebook, and then OnlineRaceDriver on Facebook both top the 50 Likes mark. And a fair proportion of those people liking what I (and the rest of the OnlineRaceDriver team) do are not existing friends of mine.

Now I know that there has been a lot of debate over the value of someone liking on Facebook, following on Twitter, or signing in via Google, but here’s the value to me. Every time someone makes that bit of effort to show a bit of support, it gives me five times the motivation to keep striving to improve what I do, offer more value, and keep going with projects which can sometimes be frustrating, are always time-consuming, but equally give me back massive amounts in terms of social media support, comments, incoming links and connecting with new people.

Buffer

Do you review who you've endorsed with a follow?

Are you a fan of the same people? (Pic: wvs on flickr)

Unlike the people who apparently follow thousands publicly on Twitter, and then have a second account to follow the people they actually listen to, I only have the one main Twitter account.

And until today, I proudly stated that I’d only ever unfollowed two people – but following 1970+ was beginning to stretch even my Twitter Addiction Disorder.

So I thought I’d do a quick check, via Twitter Karma.

In the end, I reduced my Following figure by about 30 or so. Not major, but I don’t think I can realistically go over 2000 for the time being and still interact with a reasonable percentage of people – so it frees up 30 more follows for people.

The criteria for unfollowing was a combination of:

If the account hadn’t been updated in over 100 days.
If it was someone spammy I’d mistakenly let through.
If it was someone whose interests etc were completely unrelated to mine, their blog didn’t help, and I’d never interacted with them in any way.
Or if it was a fake account or a discontinued service.

What surprised me was the amount of followers for accounts that hadn’t been updated in a year, or for discontinued services.

I wonder how many people are following dead accounts, or those that have since been revealed to be fake, or changed purpose.

So do you ever review who you’re following?

Buffer