
Reasons Why People Unfollow Brands On Twitter
This may be one of the funniest infographics that Highbridge has done to date. We do a ton of infographics for our clients, but when I read the article at eConsultancy on why folks unfollow on Twitter, I immediately thought it could make for a very entertaining infographic. Our infographic designer delivered beyond our wildest dreams.
Are you too noisy on Twitter? Are you pushing too many sales? Are you shamelessly spamming people? Or are you just plain boring? If I could wrap one word around all of these reasons, it’s value. If you’re not adding value to your audience, they’re not going to stay with you.
Without further ado, here are the top reasons why people unfollow you on Twitter.

Special thanks to eConsultancy for giving us permission to use their data to write the post!
Love this one, it will make a great pin! Will be sure to mention where it came from.
Thanks!
An interesting read. Problem with social media is people get obsessed with who’s unfollowing them. I’ve had good friends that got that way. You just need to be yourself online and if people don’t like it then that’s their decision. Don’t change yourself to keep people following you. To misquote Lincoln, “You can please some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can please all of the people all of the time.”
@twitter-14119971:disqus I totally agree, Corey! I stopped worrying about how many folks were following me about a year ago and it’s been fantastic. Freedom!!!
For business, there’s a fine line between being effective on Twitter and being annoying. It’s tempting to post multiple times to get through all of the noise and clutter, but you need to be careful. If you keep popping up in the feed with the same message your followers will tune you out or unfollow you.
It makes me want to walk away from the whole damn thing. Ugh. For the most part, I don’t pay a ton of attention to what most of my followers are tweeting there are few who put good links and content out there but most use it as a way to have conversations best had elsewhere. I do clean my list and dump those who are not following me otherwise, meh. As for unfollowing me, if I offend which I have been known to do, then unfollow me, but don’t bitch at me about it!
Amen!
I’m adding this one to my internet marketing pinboard. I agree that it’s difficult to find a happy medium between being “noisy” and sharing relevant and interesting content but the real key is to build followers who are geniunely interested in your broadcasts and to spark conversations to actually connect with people beyond simply “broadcasting.”
Presenting “things that did not need to be an infographic”, exhibit A.
And one under-reported factor: people who follow you for a couple days just to see if you’ll auto-follow them back. That seems to be the majority in my experience.
I absolutely disagree with you on it not needing to be an infographic. The stats don’t lie… This has been one of our most successful infographics. Had we just written about it… Oh wait, it WAS written in a blog post by econsultancy. And that post got a fraction of the interest that this did.
There aren’t rules to what should or shouldn’t be made into an infographic. A humorous and well illustrated graphic can perform quite well. Don’t let conventional or traditional thinking stop you from trying something that works. In this case it worked brilliantly.
PS: Auto DMs are in there 😉
I’ve redone the statistics assuming 100%=2270 total votes
Too noisy (tweets too often) [12% – 271 votes]
Too much self-promotion [11% – 249 votes]
Spammy [11% – 245 votes]
Not interesting enough [10% – 226 votes]
Too much repetition [7% – 152 votes]
Too much automation [7% – 151 votes]
Offensive / unprofessional [6% – 146 votes]
Too many ‘begging tweets’ [6% – 145 votes]
Too quiet [6% – 141 votes]
Foursquare / check-in abusers [5% – 115 votes]
No conversational tweets [5% – 108 votes]
Crimes against grammar [4% – 93 votes]
Too many retweets [4% – 90 votes]
Auto / DM abuse [4% – 86 votes]
Hashtag abusers [2% – 52 votes]
now i can keep tweeting… 😉
As I state above, this is not the case. First, the survey is an open survey and a person can enter as many times as they wish. Second, they can provide more than once. Please check out the survey: http://twtpoll.com/un5lxe
so the total of all percentages add up to 435%??? sorry, I don’t really get this… maybe whoever did this studied 100% design and 0% maths?
Elena, you’re assuming that the respondents could only provide one answer per survey. That’s not the case.
You can’t please all the people all the time. There are 3 distinct ways people use Twitter that are very different. Some use it like it is a private chat. Others like me use it to share a lot of quality information. Those who don’t like high volume are not my target audience. Even if I didn’t share so much, the Twitter chats I participate in would drive them bonkers. To each their own.
@Nick Stamoulis I agree. The best way to share something more than once is to make each tweet unique so you don’t bore anyone. That allows you to get your message across and should increase clicks.