I was on a conference call yesterday in which a woman was reporting the results of a survey.

She said something to the effect that 78.23% of those surveyed had chosen “X”.

The four-digit percentage struck me as overkill.

There are two problems with reporting a percentage such as “78.23%” on a telephone call, in a podcast, or on the radio.

1. Numbers generally are difficult to follow when the audience can only listen to the numbers (and cannot see the numbers, too).
2. Higher-precision numbers are more difficult to follow than are lower-precision numbers.

Sure, higher-precision numbers (such as “78.23%”) sound more authoritative than do lower-precision numbers (such as “78%”).

But better communication often means simpler communication.

So take a load off your listeners when you next give an oral report: Report percentages as one- or two-digit numbers instead as three- or four-digit numbers.

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I could have used “How to get people to stop following you on Twitter” as the title of this blog post.

Yesterday I got eight email messages from UseQwitter.com that various followers of me on Twitter had quit following me.

And get this: All eight quit for the same reason!

“What was the reason?,” you might ask.

I wrote four days ago my first only-personal tweet on Twitter.

All that I wrote was something to the effect of: “Go figure. Weather in Houston is spectacular, but I am sick.”

By the way: Do not look for this tweet now; I deleted it after realizing the error of my ways!

I was imitating someone whom I follow in Austin, who had tweeted something about Austin weather that same day.

But his tweet was not as personal as mine; he simply celebrated the beautiful weather that day.

What those eight Twitter followers of me did — that is, quit following me — actually matches my own behavior about a month ago, when I stopped following a woman who was tweeting like crazy and mostly about personal stuff such as boarding an airplane, going to dinner with someone, and looking for a nightclub to go dancing.

After she started to follow me, I started to follow her because she seemed to have some interesting ideas related to Internet marketing.

But the dominance of her personal tweets over her business tweets made me stop following her.

This is my personal proof that Twitter has become more commercial than personal: I will stop following others when they tweet too much about personal matters, and others stopped following me when I tweeted about one personal matter after my seventy tweets about various business matters.

So my advice to anyone is to take care with the subject matter of one’s tweets.