It’s Time to Leave Friends and Unsubscribe on Social Networks.
Twitter is in the process of rolling out 280 character tweets, which means we’ll be able to get double the information per tweet from the people we follow.
This also means that now is a good time to watch our social media feeds.
If you’re the type of person who continually adds friends and acquaintances, news sites and brands (and so on) to your Twitter and Facebook feeds but never removes anyone , it’s time.
Here’s how and why to do it.
Benefits of culling
There are many good reasons for deleting your social media feeds, but I will highlight three of them:
Culling allows you to focus your social media time on who and what you truly value. We already spend over two hours on social media every day, switching between Twitter and Facebook, Instagram and whatever else we think we need to check.
If we spend so much time on social media, then it might as well be with the people who matter most to us. I know that many of us use social media for other purposes besides chatting with friends – we also follow news sites, organizations, celebrities, anecdotes, etc. So you can expand this idea to include spending time with people and ideas that matter most to us .
For some people, this only means following our closest friends and family. For others, it means staying on top of the latest news or making a list of viewpoints that make us think. I have Twitter lists that reflect different needs and values - and yes, I select them regularly as my needs and values change.
Selection releases emotional energy. I don’t know about you, but I find it difficult to read about someone’s emotions without experiencing these emotions. While it is important for me to know how people react to a recent news or event in their own life, I realized that at one point I was absorbing too much emotional energy from my social media channels – and most of this came from people with whom I rarely communicated either in real life or on social networks.
Culling saves time. It took me about two hours to sample my social media feeds, but once I finished I found that what seemed like endless social media updates was now over. I was able to read a few Tumblr posts and close the app, satisfied that I had seen everything posted since the last checkout. If you’re the type of person who wants to read every update, regular culling is essential to keep your feeds manageable.
Ignores, blocks, unsubscribes and removes from friends
This will be familiar to a lot of people, but I want to quickly look at various ways to remove people from your social media feeds.
If you want to remove someone’s updates from your feed without saying goodbye forever, Twitter lets you mute accounts for accounts, and Facebook lets you unsubscribe from accounts. In both cases, account updates will no longer appear in your feed, but the account itself will still appear in your Twitter followers list or Facebook friends list. Instagram allows you to mute another user’s Instagram stories, but turning off the sound will not prevent that user’s photos from appearing in your Instagram feed.
This is a good way to temporarily remove someone from your feed, or stop receiving updates from someone you can’t unfollow for other reasons (for example, they are a member of an extended family).
Twitter recently added additional mute filters such as “disable all accounts without a verified email address” to help you keep trolls and offensive accounts from getting into your feed.
If mute is not enough and you want to remove the account from your followers / friends list , you need to unsubscribe on Twitter, remove from Facebook friends and unsubscribe on Instagram.
In the case of Twitter, muting an account will still allow that account owner to send you replies and direct messages – and even unsubscribing from that account won’t stop the account owner from sending you replies. If you want to prevent the account from showing up in your channels, you need toblock them. This will also block the account’s access to your Twitter feed. Instagram has a blocking feature that prevents another account from seeing your photos, and Facebook allows you to block people from tagging you and seeing your timeline.
Other social media platforms like Tumblr or Snapchat have similar methods for removing people from your feeds (or preventing them from seeing your feeds). Keep in mind that these methods are intentionally hidden – that is, the account does not receive messages that you have unsubscribed from them – but some people install third-party apps that tell them when they have been unsubscribed or unfollowed. Other people might figure it out on their own by asking themselves, “I wonder why I don’t see my nephew / cousin / former roommate on Facebook anymore?”
Whom to discard and why
Who you choose to remove from your social media feeds is ultimately up to you, but here are some tips to get you started.
Choose people who are no longer in your life. I don’t know about you, but there were a lot of people on my social media feeds who weren’t really a part of my daily life. These are former colleagues, people you once met at a conference or a party, people you knew but rarely think about if their names don’t appear on your social media feeds.
It’s okay to let these people go. Linking your feeds to people currently in your life helps you focus your social media energy on the people and relationships that matter most to you. People you care about won’t be buried among the people you passively follow.
Choose people who spread bullshit on a regular basis. We’ve all made the mistake of sharing fake photos, but we also probably know a few people who regularly share links to hyperbolic news or Snowpe-worthy urban legends. This is a great time to use the mute button, especially since constantly seeing this kind of bullshit can affect whether you believe it or not.
Delete accounts that no longer represent your current interests and goals. If you are like me, you probably follow several “inspiring” social media accounts. These could be big names in your industry, the writers or creators you admire the most, or the companies you might want to work for someday. It can also be motivational accounts, humorous accounts, posts you love to read, people whose views you value, etc. (I have a whole list on Twitter just for people whose work is interesting to me and who motivate me to improve my own work).
Do these accounts represent your current interests, or do they represent who you were a few years ago? It’s probably time to say goodbye to some of these accounts – and maybe sign up for a few new accounts that better reflect who you are now.
While you pick your Twitter and Facebook accounts, you can also view your podcast and Patreon subscription app. Yes, it will hurt a little to admit that someone is no longer your friend – and even more painful to hit a button that no longer supports someone on Patreon – but clearing up accounts, podcasts, and creators that you no longer care about can give you room for people and ideas.
You might even want to spend more time on social media.