1. I followed back spammers and porn accounts and other undesirables. I have nothing against porn stars. I’m sure they wake up and put on their latex pants like the rest of us, but I had no desire to hear about the sequel to Long Dong Silver in my tweet stream. Your profile page shows a collection of people you’ve recently begun to follow. Some of those profile pictures do not reflect fondly on your brand, and why are you following @WhipsAndChainsForMen anyway?

2. I ended up following 30,000 people. I barely look at my “All Tweets” screen. I removed it from TweetDeck. There is so much noise that I’ve had to make custom groups called “rockstars” and “awesomesauce” to read the tweets of people that I learn from or I know. I should have stayed selective in those I followed back. These days I only follow those I learn from or laugh from or who engage with me or people I find interesting. If you are looking for a tool to manage your followers, a great one is ReFollow.com. I can check off “Not Following” and down below check off “Users who have @ mentioned me” to see who have been engaging with me but I haven’t followed back. And don’t get me started on all the auto-DMs that opened up. Even after using socialtoo.com to block most of the DMs, if I get one more “it lets your Facebook friends find you on Twitter” DMs I’m going to start getting all stabby.

3. It was not being transparent. I was trading authenticity for automation. Efficiency for transparency. People would tweet or DM me that they were flattered that I followed them back, and I winced every time. I couldn’t tell them that it was automated.