YesterdayI saw the tweet of someone on Twitter telling another person that they’d decided to stop following me. His tweet was a little cutting and included the question (about me) ‘is anyone more tedious?‘
Ouch!
As someone who works hard at this social media and blogging game (and who makes a living from it) comments from others along these lines (and this one was tame in comparison to many I see) can be a little disillusioning.
So what’s a Twitter user (or blogger) to do when they lose a Twitter follower (or reader)?
note: I’m not suggesting that you do this with every follower that you lose – just those who do so in a public way. You could spend your whole life interacting with those who choose to stop following you!
1. Acknowledge the Persons Decision and Ask for Constructive Feedback
The first thing that I always try to do (and it can take some self control when people leave an an attacking way) is to respond to the person in some way to firstly acknowledge that you’ve seen what they’ve said, to farewell them from your network and to ask for feedback.
Usually I would try to do this in the medium that the person has made their public comment. So in the example above I responded with a public tweet – “sorry to lose you – happy to take some constructive feedback if you’d like to give it”
Responding in this way does a number of things:
TweetDeck has become my primary Desktop Twitter client over the last 6 months of the year and has quite literally changed the way that I Tweet on a number of levels.
