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Wednesday, September 22, 2010

Unfriend, Unfollow, Unsubscribe: How to turn people away

As social media has gained popularity, many books and blogs have been written, many videos recorded, and many prezi's built on how a person can increase their friends, followers, and subscribers.

An entire mini-economy has sprung up promising to provide friends, followers, and subscribers, for a nominal fee.
However, to my knowledge, very little research has been done on how to get your current friends, followers, and subscribers, to unfriend, unfollow, and unsubscribe from you. There are many reasons that someone might want to do this:
  • Peace and quiet
  • Frustration at the amount of time it takes to maintain shallow relationships
  • Simply don't like people
Here are my top five ways to get people to unfriend, unsubscribe, and unfollow your social media feeds:
How to get "unfriended" on Facebook:
1. Incessantly post about Farmville, MobWars, Fast Money, etc.
2. Write long, rambling status updates that would make your English teacher empty the ink out of three red pens.

3. Automate your Facebook account so that your Twitter, YouTube, Blogger, FriendFeed, MySpace, and Plurk accounts post to your wall, but never actually check or use your Facebook account.
4. Post birthday wishes to the walls of "friends" you have neither seen, spoke to, or communicated with in years in an attempt to appear like you care.
5. Join a bunch of completely useless, pointless, and ridiculous groups/pages.
How to get "unfollowed" on Twitter:
1. Participate in every "tweet to win" scheme you can find.
2. Don't upload a profile picture or complete your bio.
3. Tweet about what you ate...for every meal.
4. Ask for help and advice from your Tweeps but never acknowledge them nor offer assistance when they need it.
5. RT Justin Bieber, Lady Gaga, Ashton Kutcher, etc on a regular basis.

How to get people to "unsubscribe" from your blog: 
1. Don't allow those who read blogs through an RSS reader to access the full text of your blog post-- force them to visit your blog every single time they want to read what you have to say.
2. Ensure that at least 1 out of every two posts is your most recent bookmark from Delicious, Redit, Stumbledupon, etc. Make sure that you forget to annotate your book marks as well, making them even less useful.
3. Repost things that we've already seen. Like the "Charlie Bit Me" video.
4. Add so many gadgets, widgets, and do-dads to your site that readers can't even find your posts.
5. Ask for comments, but never reply to them.

2 comments:

  1. Ha! Really enjoyed this post. Sometimes our tech savviness causes us to over connect our profiles to the point of redundancy.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I must admit that I am guilty of that one as well. At one point I had a circular posting issue that re-posted the same thing multiple times.

    ReplyDelete

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