chris brogan Archives - The Heath Mullikin Project

I am a huge fan of Twitter and other social media. At the point where I was trying to build 2 blogs, make a little money online, and connect with people around the world I made the decision to use a program called TweetAdder. TweetAdder is a tool that allows you automatically follow back anyone who follows you on Twitter, send messages automatically, and do things that can gain you a large following. I was obsessed with my follower count. At one point, @chaseurlion was over 40,000 followers, @chaseyourlion was over 15,000, and @heathmullikin was over 20,000. I was trying to build a brand, but instead I built a monster.

There are lots of people who use tools like Tweet Adder to spam the world. I tried not to be one of those people. I was content to follow people based on certain criteria and unfollow them based on other things. Out of over 75,000 followers, only about 30% were real people. Now, did this tool and strategy help me connect with great people I wouldn’t have met otherwise? Absolutely. In the process was I following around 75,000 people myself? Yes, and many of them were sketchy to say the least. I knew it was time for a Twitter Reboot.

A few things have happened over time to bring me to this place. First, there was a run of great people who decided to unfollow everyone and start all over on Twitter. Michael Hyatt blogged about it here and he heard about it from Chris Brogan. Now, I’m not going unfollow everyone, but I am going unfollow a lot of people. Secondly, I decided that managing multiple accounts and blogs was not in my best interests. Finally, I realized that every connection mattered. Being followed by a spam California real estate firm with 100,000 followers was far less important than connecting with a college student with 25 serious followers. TweetAdder had taken true intentionality and connection out of the equation.

Enter ManageFlitter. Erik Fisher from Beyond the To Do List recommended this service and I am loving it so far. ManageFlitter is not a bot that runs 24/7. It allows you to really see who’s following you and who you’re following. My favorite feature is that I’ve been able to see who’s tweeting too much(spammers) and who’s not tweeting at all(quitters). Neither of these groups are real connections so unfollow away! It also has a great Whitelist and block feature. I can list everyone I know and never want to unfollow(Whitelist) and blocking means that I will never follow that person and they are unable to follow, DM or @mention me. There are all sorts of great uses for ManageFlitter, but right now I’m concentrating on making all of my connections count. Did I mention that they have a free version?

All of this is part of a strategy involving two projects I’m working on this year. It will all tie in with the calling God has placed on my life and some great opportunities ahead of me. Call all of this “Launch Preparations.”

In the past few weeks, two of my favorite bloggers announced they were starting over with twitter. First Chris Brogan and then Michael Hyatt declared that the recent proliferation of spam had led them to make the decision. Note to self: don’t click on any DM links that says “I laughed when I saw this picture of you.” These guys both had huge followings and it got me to thinking about my twitter strategy. I have had two Chase Your Lion accounts for a while and today made the move to merge the two. What I found is that their follower lists are almost identical. It has taken some time this morning to get Tweet Adder and Hootsuite back up and running properly. I actually had to delete Hootsuite on my iphone and reinstall it. So, now I’m pointing all my followers to http://www.twitter.com/chaseyourlion. It is the former @chaseurlion account and now the old Chase Your Lion is now @chaseyourlion2 until I’ve got everything moved and delete it. I will then keep up with who’s spamming me by running Twitblock once a month and blocking them. Now, the next phase is changing all the old links on my blogs to reflect these changes.

The top 3 reasons for doing all of this:

My Chase Your Lion tweets will be more frequent and focused since I’m not having to come up with material for 2 accounts.
I can now spend some time on another not so serious Twitter personality I’ve created.
I was never happy with the name “chaseurlion” but ChaseYourLion wasn’t available in 2009 for some reason.

What are your thoughts? Have you noticed an uptick in the twitter spam you receive? Are these guys crazy to unfollow tens of thousands of people?