I don’t feel the need to block anyone that follows me since I am not auto-following back. If someone turns creeper on me then I will block.

Now my strategy is, I follow who I want to follow, not just anybody who follows me. And I’m not afraid of unfollowing someone who is becoming annoying or whatever.

It’s been cathartic to say the least.

real estate, get rich on twitter or any $$ people, MLM is hte plague, and people who have 50,000 followers and never interact…

About once a week I use TwitterKarma to sort through all those who are following me but I’m not following. And then….

If you’re a twitbot who followed me only b/c of a keyword in one of my posts…. block.
If you’re clearly not a real person, or you’re crazy wicked porn or something… block.
If you ARE a real person but there’s something creepy about your twitter page and/or blog… block.
If you’re a real person, but there’s not anything that really compels me to want to follow you, I won’t follow you, but I won’t block you.
If you’re a resource tweet regarding something I’m actually interested in (like local weather or news)…. follow
If you’re a real person in one of my areas of interest & you contribute something interesting, and especially if you have a real blog…. follow.

I don’t like that I’m sorting this all out manually, but honestly it’s only been in the past 2-3 weeks that it’s become really necessary. Seems like the auto-follow/keyword follow traffic has really picked up.

Community – Friends, Family & other people I have had legitimate interactions with.

Mentors – Mostly pastors, plus a few others whos tweets I find inspiring.

Music – Pretty much what you would think here.

News – Again, the obvious here.

If you don’t fit into one of these groups, I don’t follow you. I guess it comes down to what you are looking for in this type of forum. This works for me.

I follow people that I’m friends with IRL, that seem interesting, or that I think I can learn something from. I’m still new to Twitter, so I’m still learning how it all works – and I don’t want to devote an entire day to catching up on the tweets of EVERYONE.

I go through my followers about every 2 weeks to see if there is someone interesting in there that I’ve been missing, and to block those that are “too” interesting.

No, I haven’t unfollowed you, mainly because your tweets (generally ) are “content.” TBH, the redundancy of following you and TWC can be trying. That’s why I unfollowed @churchcrunch. @human3rror re-posts everything anyway, so why do I need both?

Just this morning I unfollowed something who (while some of his posts have some meat) sends 30 tweets a day about the song playing on the radio. I unfollowed another dude last week who I liked, but he would send six tweets in a row. Obviously he doesn’t get Twitter!

That’s probably more info than you wanted, but there it is!

There’s no real point (from where I sit) in following a billion people. I follow people that add to the quality of the conversation I’m already engaged in.

For example, I don’t follow a whole lot of folks OTHER than graphic design and church/worship leadership oriented peeps.

It keeps my conversations focused and I feel like instead of being at a “cocktail party” with thousands of people I have nothing in common with, at the very least, I’m now at a cocktail party with people that all share the same interests. (google twitter is (was) a cocktail party).

A caveat: anyone who claims to be a “social media guru” in their bio generally does not get followed back.

I’m more about building community rather than growing my follower base. To give you an idea, while my following/followers is about equal (221/261), friendorfollow says I have “mutual follows” with 128 people. I try to manage it such that I can more or less keep up with everyone. Tweetdeck helps with that (though I would like for them to pull more tweets on start-up!). My columns are “Friends” (mostly 3D fans, as that community is what dragged me into Twitter), “Celebs” (anyone who gathers followers based on “who they are”…IOW most in this column do not follow me back), “News” (some “news” type tweets + official feeds, etc… @theworshipcomm is in there), “Other” (everyone else). Most of my unfollows come from the “other” column though most of my “Others” do stay.

So that’s more than you needed to know, but that’s the general method to my madness…

YES – thanks for chiming in … “not tweeting” is definitely just as much a strategy!

For the sake of my job, my time and my sanity I have chosen not to twitter at all.

In general those I don’t know but take the initiative to follow me will be involved with either worship ministry or internet marketing in some way or other. So I follow them to keep tabs on what they’re doing. Once in a while they have something interesting and helpful for me, so I have no complaints.

I use Tweetdeck to sort through the people that I want to keep track of, and the one’s that I don’t keep close tabs on.

So … have you unfollowed me yet? (folks around here are constantly giving me a hard time about my over-twittering)

I unfollow people who give me too much “noise” and not enough “content.”

Thanks for your quick reply!