Twitter users who actively engage almost always use some sort of third-part application. Followers are sorted into different groups, which is a great way of organising them. And of course, many followers are not being assigned at all to a group, so their tweets do not show up. They follow you, you follow them, they probably don’t read your tweets; you don’t read theirs. They add to your followers count, you add to theirs. It works – as your followers number keeps growing, more people start following you. I now call this the Loophole Cheat – artificially inflating your own and their follower’s numbers while still following the etiquette.

Although I have always blocked spammers and sex sites in the past, I have cheated many times over the last months. To be exact, I have cheated 139 times. Can you believe that? I have followed back 139 people I was not really interested in. 139 out of 490 – or nearly 30% of the total! Last Friday, I put an end to it – I unfollowed everyone I should not have followed in the first place. My follower’s count was just shy of 500, 494 to be exact. I felt the effect immediately – my follower’s count started dropping quickly. My actions were even twittered by a service called followermonitor; apparently they think it makes a great tweet to publish openly who unfollows one of their users. It is sad – this service has more than 32000 followers.

In order to figure out whom I did not wish to follow any longer, I put in a day of work: I opened up the profile of every single person/company I was following and checked out their tweets. You know what the great thing was? I actually found a handful of very interesting people that never made it into one of my groups. I had followed them, but in the end I was ignoring them. I would have never found about it without going through this exercise.

I am in the wine business – so are approximately 80% of my followers, who I not only follow, but whose tweets I read. This is what is all about – I do not need high follower numbers, I do need to engage with people that matter. I am glad I no longer use the Loophole Cheat. It feels good to put out tweets to followers who follow you for a reason other than the expectation that you follow back.