The Twitter Diet All the Rage

I’ve got 255 friends on Twitter – a relatively modest number but, nevertheless, a group that is valuable, manageable, and carefully selected and nurtured.

There are, however, many people who have thousands, 10s of thousands, and even 100,000 friends – mostly social media-savvy companies, celebrities, marketers, and people focused on building personal brands.

This group includes JetBlue (@jetblue), dating coach Scott McKay (@scottmckay), tech evangelist Robert Scoble (@scobleizer), blogger Perry Belcher (@perrybelcher) and Twitter watcher Twitter Tips (@twitter_tips).

For them, a large group of friends provides a large audience to distribute content and information – even if means having to follow many of them back.

There appears to be, however, a small but palpable realization that having thousands of friends is perhaps not an ideal situation, even though there are some benefits.

What I’ve noticed is some friend-aholics are flushing out all their followers, and then rebuilding their friend network. Another approach is some people are closing their Twitter accounts, so they can get a fresh start with a new account.

A couple of examples:

- Scoble recently unfollowed 106,000 people so, among other things, he can manage his friends easier and in less time, as well as follow “smart people” that he can learn from. He’s taking a new and discerning approach to who he follows rather than following everyone and anyone.

- Axel Schultze slimmed the number of friends to 1,500 based on a recognition that Dunbar contends you can have 150 “stable social relationships” with 150 people – and that this could be expanded to 1,500 within the context of social media relationship (a 10X factor)

I’m not suggesting we’re going to see a massive unfollow trend happening but the decisions made by Scoble and Schultze suggests the novelty of having thousands of friends may be fading because the disadvantages outweigh the benefits.

To me, Twitter is like a parade where you see a constant flow of information coming along the digital highway. You miss some of it when you do other things (e.g. spend time with friends and family, work, exercise) but there’s plenty of new and interesting stuff on the horizon – just like you can miss a float or two during a parade but there’s still more cool floats down the road.

With all that information coming at you on a steady basis, does it make sense to thousands or 10s of thousands of people? Clearly, some people are deciding otherwise.

What do you think? How many people do you follow? Have you decided to follow fewer people? If so, why?

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