The Sordid Business of Deleting a Twitter Account

Sniffle, Sniffle.

After weeks and weeks of deliberation (seriously), I’ve finally decided to nuke my @ThatsNotWright on Twitter.

May not seem a big deal. I mean, people delete their social media accounts all the time, especially minimalists like me.

But this was my first, 

And it represented the last holdout of the first iteration of Small Biz Triage – That’s Wright Marketing.  I dumped that brand ages ago because it was too ego-centric (even for me), but the nostalgic value has still been pretty high.  I created the account the week that Eric Fridrich first birthed Savor the Sound, the grand-daddy of Small Biz Triage, back in April of 2009.

This public murder of a little bird named @ThatsNotWright was conceived long ago, and inspired by specifically from an interview The Minimalists conducted with Julien Smith. I chronicled that revelation after nuking my digital movie collection. My pursuit of digital minimalism and recent productivity kick has resulted in hundreds of hours of combining, consolidating, distilling and even deleting account, files and profiles scattered across the web and my hard drive.

For you sickos out there wanting to destroy your little blue bird, read one for step-by-step instructions.

How to Merge Two Twitter Accounts

Want to know how I did it?  Well the short answer is, there is not right way to merge two Twitter accounts.  You can, however, grab your better quality followers from your old account and strongly encourage them to follow your new primary account.

Step 1) Create a TweetBackup Account and run your first back-up.

Step 2) Use a tool like ManageFlitter (paid version) or Tweepi (free) to follow your followers. In my case, I logged into my primary account @SmallBizTriage and followed all of @ThatsNotWright’s followers. I ran a quick clean-up after doing this, flushing out the eggheads and inactives.  Of my 164 followers on that account, less than half were active or legitimate. Common for ill-maintained accounts.

Step 3) I notified all of my more important followers via clustered @mentions like in the example below.

Step 4) I pulled the trigger.

Step 5) And now I mourn for the next 30-days, and try not to dig up that grave.