

Why I Think @TheOnion Has Unfollowed A Record 485,000 People On Twitter - bensummers
http://twittercism.com/the-onion/

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iamdave
If you want the hypothesized reason TheOnion unfollowed a record 485,00
people, the author says:

>I assumed whoever it was that managed their social media campaign had decided
that enough was enough, and pulled the plug.

The rest of the article is filler.

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ab9
I certainly hope it's not surprising to anyone that a company following half a
million people isn't paying close attention to all of them.

There's little _technical_ reason for The Onion to follow back its followers.
Yes, Onion employees could read a random sample of their followers' tweets, or
use filtering software that selects useful-looking tweets for human attention.
But they can simply use their followers' RSS feeds for that; they don't need
to formally follow them back. The only advantage I can think of is that
Twitter automatically bundles your followees' RSS feeds together into a single
feed. (But I'm curious how Twitter delivers an RSS feed that aggregates half a
million talkative users -- does it still work at that volume?)

Naturally, follow-backs are merely symbolic at that scale, so mass unfollowing
doesn't strike me as news. It was a little interesting to see the how many
immediate unfollows The Onion's move triggered, though.

~~~
johns
The other reason is so people can DM them. That's usually the reason why
popular accounts follow people.

~~~
ab9
Ah, I didn't think of that. Thank you.

