Last year, Jim Connolly advocated unfollowing all your twitter ‘friends’. This went against the advice of Guy Kawasaki, and Scobleizer disagreed with him publicly. Now Scobleizer admits that a vast array people is simply not effective. So Scobleizer announced he will unfollow 105,000 people.

Surely there is a middle ground.

Following everyone who follows you makes sense, from a perspective of growing your visibility on the web. But staying in touch with those precious few who cross-pollinate your field of expertise is impossible when we have to deal with all the noise generated by too many Twitter ‘friends’.

But simple marketing laws apply.

First of all, you should have several twitter accounts. The reasons are simple

• Having several accounts allow you to target your tweets to a specific audience (currently I have one for SEO and just started one for small businesses)
• It also allows you to create a separate account where you only follow a few people, so you can stay in touch with ALL their tweets (yup, some twitters are that good)
• Your accounts that autofollow then become a pool you dip in to (nobody reads every tweet anyway.) You can stay in touch via RT’s, DM’s and @mentions.

I admit that the problem with the latter point is that there is lots of wastage. What is sorely needed is a spam filter for twitter.

I don’t believe it is an all or nothing deal. We can have the best of many worlds.