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The mass un-follow finished just before I left for Atlantic City. The plan worked perfectly, as many bots / spammers / and people looking to game their following count unfollowed me. The @BJMendelson account is still losing followers but not as fast. I suspect the account will continue to deflate for quite a while.
I am going to wait a week until I start following everyone back starting Monday, August 31st.
Why?
This is a test. Remember, my goal is to have 1,000,000 volunteers following me (and I following them). If you’re going to unfollow me because I unfollowed you (and you didn’t see this blog post or the numerous tweets saying I was going to follow everyone back soon), I hope you will follow me on Facebook instead.
I need the 1,000,000 Twitter volunteers to be active, engaged, and paying attention to what comes their way because if you miss a major detail (or three of them), it could mean problems trying to organize supply drives and Tweetups for the shelters when we are on the road.
An Example
Last night, I re-tweeted the following for Mark:
RT:” @hardlynormal 14 years ago today was my last day homeless living on Hollywood Blvd! Tomorrow I celebrate 14 years sober!”
Now. I thought if the giant RT didn’t give away that the message was a re-tweet, then the semicolon would. And if not the semicolon, the quotation marks on both sides of the message.
I thought wrong.
I started to receive many messages congratulating me on my accomplishment, despite the fact that: 1) I’ve only been to Los Angeles once and 2) if I was celebrating fourteen years of sobriety today, I would have started drinking when I was 12.
This has been a reoccurring problem for me. People reply to tweets without necessarily clicking through to the link (and thus only replying to the headline) or reading the headline. If you’re doing either frequently, that’s an issue because it will hinder us from helping others.
It also means I need to do a better job phrasing my re-tweets, which I pledge to work on. But if this is going to work, I need to get all of us on one page so we can help as many people as possible.
So please, read the tweets I’m sending your way, especially starting September 1st when I change how I use Twitter. More on that one soon.
