I’ve been using Twitter since January of 2008 and have really come to love the community of people I’ve met and connected with. It has also been a tremendous place to do business, see and be seen by the world. It’s been amazing to watch over this time that nearly 15,000 people read what I tweet. It’s been an organic growth of followers. I’m truly blessed to have one person reading my tweets…let alone thousands of people.

Lately, I’ve been contemplating the number of people that I follow. Since I often tried to follow everyone back that followed me, I noticed over the last 6 months, my DM inbox was more and more filled with SPAM and my tweet stream was so clogged, that I couldn’t keep up and more importantly, I’d lose/miss tweets in the mass of thousands and thousands of tweets from people’s tweets that I’d want to see. An increasing number of tweets would be purely marketing only type tweets. I was missing the tweets that were VALUABLE to me!

What to do…what to do?

Then two weeks ago, I by chance caught in my tweetstream that Chris Pirillo wrote he just used UnFollowAll to clean up his Twitter account. It was free and would delete EVERYONE that you followed on Twitter. I FOUND what I’d been looking for…a fresh start without having to take the time to weed out the spammers, the marketers, etc.

Later that evening my follow account was wiped clean. It was back to zero. And to be honest, a bit freeing from the tweet noise.

Then I slowly started adding back my associates, friends, peers from the Seattle Social Media Club, people related to my niche and generally anyone I know, enjoy reading tweets from as well in the last 2 years.

It wasn’t long thereafter that I got called a “Twitter snob” by more than one person for not following everyone who followed me. Well ya know what? I don’t care what people think is the right way for me to use my Twitter account. But then again, these are the same people who swooned over a certain flash-in-the-pan social media guru who made some quick money making webinars & JV’ing with other “industry names” about the right way to use social media…who has since deleted his account. They’re also the same people who use software to artificially add followers.

I’ve been using Twitter to share what I’m passionate about like fitness and workouts like P90X from Beachbody and most everything in social media. I also share a lot of what I read and definitely share what I believe would be useful information for people who follow me. Twitter is an extension of my life but my life does not revolve around Twitter. Like this month I’ve hardly been tweeting due to a house remodel and soon to be moving experience. Twitter is one piece of the social media puzzle I use to build my business from home. But that’s just me…we all use Twitter for different reasons.

As I was writing this post this morning, I get an email from none other than Joel Comm who had just wrote on his blog that he just purged his Twitter account too. Joel was one of my early “friends” on Twitter. He provided value and often was funny in his tweets. A good guy you should be following: @JoelComm. As I was reading it, one of the things he wrote was:

Just as Twitter is a dynamic site that evolves and changes as it grows, how we use Twitter must also remain fluid.

Let me be clear about one thing.

Twitter is here for the long haul, and it is more important than ever for businesses to be using the service. It’s even more important for them to use it in a way that builds relationships and enhances brands.

I agree with that because without Twitter, there would be no way I would have ever connected with many of the people I have on Twitter because we live in different parts of the country and the world. It has radically shifted the way people communicate and even do business online. It’s dynamic…ever changing…and a powerful tool to develop personal brand and multiply your social networking influence. But there is yet to be a “perfect way” to use Twitter…and until there is, I’ll continue to follow my instincts and do what is natural for me.

And I’m at peace with my decision to delete everyone.

What are your thoughts on why I deleted who I followed on Twitter and why people like Chris Pirillo and Joel Comm did the same thing?

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