The Art of Unfollowing

Growing up in the social media age, you most likely have some form of social media, whether it’s Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, or anything else that you can come up with. Along those years of using social media and having an account, you’ve probably accrued some followers and in the process, you’ve followed some of them back. Now you’re in this weird bubble of an internet friendship with people even though some of these people you don’t even interact with outside of the “like” feature. And there comes a point where you’re scrolling through your feed and seeing people’s posts and you have to ask yourself…. “why do I even follow this person?”.

That’s when the art of unfollowing comes in.

Unfollowing people suddenly went from a daunting act where I hoped I wasn’t offending anyone to a form of therapy. Why should I have people that I don’t care for in my timeline? Why should people I don’t even talk to have an inside scoop on my life and give me unnecessary notifications?

It was a little difficult at first: I kept making excuses like “but she was so nice to me in high school!” or “this is the son of my mom’s friend’s friend” but when you sit down and reflect on your connection with each person, you begin to put value into your real relationships. At the end of the unfollowing process, you end up with a feed solely of people you love, admire, and most importantly: free of toxicity.

It was a huge weight off my shoulders, and probably one of the most satisfying cleanses I’ve ever done for myself. I went from a following count of over 1000 people to just over 600. Even now I still do mini-unfollow sprees from time to time to keep my feeds fresh and to make my time on social media something worthwhile.

Here are some of my tips and shortcuts for y’all to do the same:

• On Facebook, there are daily notifications on whose birthday is that day. Sometimes that notification reminds you that you haven’t talked to the said person in like 10+ years, leading you to go to their profile page to unfriend instead of writing a happy birthday.
• On Snapchat, you can press and hold a person’s story and click on “More” and remove them as a friend.
• For Instagram, a good place to start might be by looking at who has unfollowed you first. There are lots of unfollowing tracker apps on the App Store, but I use an app called “Followers”. Once I linked my Instagram, I can see who has unfollowed me, and I’ll just search them up on my Instagram and reciprocate the action. You can unfollow them directly from the app if you use a paid version of the app.
•  For Twitter there’s an app in the App Store called “unfollow” (just search Twitter unfollow) and once you sync your account, you can unfollow people quickly and  directly from the app.

HAPPY UNFOLLOWING EVERYONE!