Robert Caruso

Digital Marketing B2B, B2C, SaaS, Tech
#Tampa #marketing #content

[Robert Caruso @fondalo]

Have you ever heard the term knowledge is power? I disagree with that phrase and I can tell you why.

#Marketing #business #Wisdom #success #winning #Thursday

[Robert Caruso @fondalo]

@RyanBiddulph You bet!

[Robert Caruso @fondalo]

This right here. Well said brother

[Blogging From Paradise @RyanBiddulph]

Give genuine readers the gift of your attention.

Listen. Learn. Help.

[Robert Caruso @fondalo]

@4thOfJuly365 Well said!

[Robert Caruso @fondalo]

Not many blessings are better than being in the gym with your youngest boy several times a week.

[Robert Caruso @fondalo]

All necessary platforms and channels under a unified strategy and executional plan is the only way...

[Engage Digital @Engage_Digital_]

A brand presence and website without a content system and strategy that stretches across their entire online footprint is just a brochure.

Separate online channel silos without an integrated strategy that converts are just noise.

Silos feel busy. Marketing integration compounds

[Robert Caruso @fondalo]

@MosClement Let me know what you find with yours

[Robert Caruso @fondalo]

I unfollowed 52,500 accounts on X, and you will be amazed at what I discovered.

Why I did it - My feed was noise; 17 years of various startups + agency + my topic shifts

I have been on Twitter/X since 2009. I have seen many changes over that period, and they weren’t always for the better. Now X has become one of my favorite platforms again for free speech without fear of being deplatformed for political views and massive improvements in the sites value. However, I had so many accounts that I followed, my feed did not have much value and I found myself having to go to news and/or searching for subject matter content rather than discovering it in my feed.

How I did it – Manually over 5 months, I opened nearly every profile; and reviewed bio, location, last post and more.

I was following some 54,000 accounts on X and had some 79,000 followers myself. I set out to MANUALLY unfollow accounts that were inactive, or not providing value to my feed. I literally opened nearly EVERY SINGLE account profile that I was following and evaluated them based on bio content, feed content, their location, and activity/last postdate. Sounds time consuming and detailed, doesn’t it? It was!

What I found - 80% were dead/inactive (many last post was 2017, and a fair amount had not posted for 9-12 months).

Some of the citeria I used to determine whether to unfollow accounts are listed below as well as some of the insights I gained from this grueling process:

**The biggest surprise to me was that more than 80% of the accounts that I was following were Inactive accounts since 2025 or well before.

- I often had to see if the account had a website listed and clicked out to review deeper. Many URLs were dead links. That surprised me.

- ZERO Profile/Bio information – If you won’t take time to say a bit about yourself, I can’t take time to review your profile or follow you.
- Lying about actual location
- Sales, Marketing, Content/Writers, Consultants, People and Agencies were found to be Dead/Inactive accounts at the rate of about 60%+
- Dead/Dying/Inactive Technology and Startup companies
- Off topic accounts for me: Authors, Speakers, coaches, “Leader, Guru, Expert, Mavens”, those primarily sharing sports, music/producers, and Marxist, Woke Reich Conspiracy and porn accounts. All were unfollowed.
- Foreign Brands, People OR Foreign Language Accounts (as primary posts)
- The Share/RT only content poster
- Brands/People posting primarily only self-promotion/affiliate/store content.
- Accounts primarily auto-posting from their other platforms to their X account (Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, etc)

Additional interesting Notes and Observations while cleaning out my following list:

1) Nearly every SINGLE Marketing agency with Boutique in their description was inactive.
2) Many accounts stating they were the best at something, were inactive.
3) The majority of self-described “Angel, Tech, and Startup Investors/VCs” were inactive.
4) The year of last post for a large number of the inactive accounts I unfollowed was 2017. Why, did so many accounts stop posting on Twitter then? ***See Grok research I did on this timeline and potential reason for the rapid inactivity of many accounts. -> https://t.co/hGSd0dEWYD
5) Some of the accounts I had unfollowed during the process appeared in my following list again, there’s clearly a bug on X’s unfollow system. I noticed this quite often during my unfollow process. Further research on this bug determined that the bug occurs when unfollowing from the list of accounts I follow using the unfollow button. When opening the user profile page and unfollowing that way, it removed the issue and took considerably longer to unfollow a significant amount of users which were obviously an unfollow candidate, but I still had to open their profile to ensure the unfollow was registered.
6) As I was going through the evaluation and unfollow process, I frequently received errors from X, and it would stop displaying the profile pages and posts of users. Ironically, the error said it was them and not me. Happened daily! @elon should know about this!
7) MOST accounts with the phrase “award winning” in the bio were completely inactive for some time. Not all, but most.
8) I found many more accounts than I thought I would with lines in their profile bios containing something like “I have left this platform for good, or I am no longer active on this platform”. Having said that, though it was many more than I would have guessed that I would find, it was an insignificant percentage of people I unfollowed.
9) For some I decided to remain following, it was because I knew them personally or I would find something in a recent post that was interesting and either liked, commented, or shared it. Very few acknowledged the engagement.

The Result - My feed is constantly full of interesting and relevant content now. I am going to news/search less frequently.

Have you done anything similar on X or any other platforms? What were your findings?

[Robert Caruso @fondalo]

@MosClement 👊

[Robert Caruso @fondalo]

This!

[Madalyn Sklar @MadalynSklar]

I don’t measure whether an AI tool is worth using by how many times I open it.

I measure what it gives me back.

Did it save me an hour?
Help me get unstuck?
Turn an idea into something usable?

That’s the ROI I care about.

[Robert Caruso @fondalo]

@MosClement Was a lot of work, but worth it for sure

[Robert Caruso @fondalo]

@MosClement Very true man

[Robert Caruso @fondalo]

@MadalynSklar Well said!

[Robert Caruso @fondalo]

@douglehman Thanks for sharing Doug! I appreciate it

[Robert Caruso @fondalo]

@Lisapatb @grok I closed the app on my phone and reopened it and that seemed to clear the issue.

[Robert Caruso @fondalo]

This is @grok within the X mobile app this morning. Yikes

[Robert Caruso @fondalo]

@JulieFrench_ B & C together

[Robert Caruso @fondalo]

@grok Hmmmm not good

[Robert Caruso @fondalo]

@grok Yes. Had to stop and restart the app. Not a good look. Also, why doesn't it carry history from grok in x app and grok on the web? Same account. Makes it very challenging to track historical, ongoing chats.

[Robert Caruso @fondalo]

@grok Nope