Manage Your Twitter Followers With Three Simple Tools
February 20 by Chris Skoyles in Technology | 268 Shares
When you’ve been on Twitter for some amount of time, the number of people you follow can quickly mount up.
This is especially true if you subscribed to the etiquette of returning the favor to everybody who follows you when building up your social network.
There’s certainly no problem in following several thousand people if that’s what works for you, but if you’re anything like this writer, you’ll probably find a smaller number much more manageable. It may be that, in following every tweeter in existence, your stream has been clogged with all manner of tweets which, whilst interesting in their own right, don’t add as much value to your Twitter stream as you’d like
It could even be that some of those irrelevant tweets come from people you only followed as a courtesy and who no longer follow you anyway, or it could just be that you like to keep on top of these things. Whatever your reasons for wanting to manage your following/follower ratio on Twitter, here’s three simple tools to do the job quickly and simply.
Friend or Follow
Friend or Follow is a nifty little website which breaks your followers down into three simple categories:
- Following: Those you follow who don’t reciprocate.
- Fans: Those who follow you, yet you aren’t following them.
- Friends: Those with whom you share a mutual following/follower relationship
There are a couple of tools floating around on the Internet which provide a similar function, but where Friend or Follow’s beauty lies is in its utter simplicity. Head to the website (www.friendorfollow.com) and in the nice friendly box on the homepage, type in your Twitter username and submit. From there, the site displays the avatars of any users you follow but, for whatever reason, don’t follow you back in a handy grid.
Where it lets you down is in the inability to unfollow people direct from the site, but if you do want to unfollow someone, it’s as simple as clicking on their avatar to load their profile to handle unfollowing via Twitter. Hit the fans tab, and you’ll be presented with those folks you’re not following back. There might be a good reason for this, but if you lost track of who to follow back, this tab comes in pretty handy. As for the friends tab, I’ve yet to find much of a use for this yet, though I’m sure there must be one.
Qwitter
If you’d rather not have to remember to visit a website to manage your Twitter followers, Qwitter, one of the longest-serving and arguably most popular services of its type, rounds up a list of who stops following you and e-mails said list to you once a week. Again, the website (http://beta.useqwitter.com) is incredibly simple to use:
Submit your username on the homepage and you’ll be asked to hook up Qwitter to your Twitter account. Once that’s done, enter and verify your e-mail address and each week you’ll be given a list of everyone who’s abandoned ship in the past seven days.
This is a few more steps than the first site we looked at, but once you’ve completed these steps you never need visit the site again, just wait for that weekly e-mail.
Untweeps
Again, there are a number of services out there which do a similar task to Untweeps, but since we like things easy and simple, this one gets the nod.
The idea behind Untweeps is very straightforward; seek out any inactive accounts you’re following on Twitter and learn how long they’ve been inactive for. Head to the site (http://untweeps.com) and authorize the site to access your Twitter account. Next, simply enter how many days back you’d like to search for inactive accounts. You’ll be presented with a list of those inactive users, along with the last date they tweeted.
Where Untweeps triumphs over other services is that you can take care of any unfollowing you’d like to do from right there in the site. Useful,right? After all, who wants to be following someone who never tweets?
Conclusion
These three tools should be everything you need to keep tabs of your Twitter followers, though it would be great to hear some of your suggestions for alternatives below.
(Photo credit: Black keyboard with blue Follow Me button via Shutterstock)
Chris,
Good advice and in fact, I have never even heard of these tools before.
I tend to do some filtering as soon as someone follows me: I rarely follow back if there are no existing tweets or when the follower doesn’t match my target group.
Still, this requires some work and any tool for managing follows/unfollows is welcome!
Cheers,
Timo
Hi Tim,
Glad I could help, hope you find those tools useful!
I’m similar in that I do tend to look at who follows me before I return the favor, but some times life’s a lot easier using any of the three above.
Thanks for the feedback,
Chris
Personally, I don’t subscribe to the point of view that if someone follows you on Twitter, there is some sort of moral obligation on you to follow them back. And I especially dislike the implication that people you follow should follow you back or they are ungrateful deadbeats. In my view this is the wrong way to use Twitter. I follow people whose tweets I find interesting, often discovering them when they are retweeted by other people I follow and respect. I certainly don’t expect anyone I choose to follow to follow me back ‘to return the favour’. And I can’t see any particular point in unfollowing people who have become inactive on Twitter. If they are inactive they won’t be filling up my Twitter stream anyway, so where’s the problem?
I won’t personally be using any of these tools, therefore, though I can see that they might perhaps be useful to people who see Twitter as a marketing tool pure and simple, and regard building their follower numbers as the be-all-and-end-all.
Just my opinion, of course!
I use Social Bro which does the same tasks as all three of these programs combined with the exception of emailing results. However, I do still like looking at new tools; thanks for sharing.
Dusty from Friend or Follow here!
Thanks so much for the shout out! There are actually a couple of ways to unfollow (or follow) from Friend or Follow. One being to simply click over to Twitter like you mentioned, but you can also hover over the user’s icon and click on the follow/unfollow button there. With our Gold account you can also follow/unfollow from the list view, and via the bulk user management feature.
For your readers, here’s a coupon code for 1 month free of Friend or Follow Gold. Just enter the code LIFEHACK at checkout.
Personally, I don’t subscribe to the point of view that if someone
follows you on Twitter, there is some sort of moral obligation on you to
follow them back. And I especially dislike the implication that people
you follow should follow you back or they are ungrateful deadbeats. In
my view this is the wrong way to use Twitter.
There are people following me that I would probably like to follow–but I got behind in looking at people as they follow me and now the number of people I’m not following back is simply unmanageable. There are too many to look at each one, figure out if they are a spammer or a marketer or inactive and then decide if I want to follow them or not.
But what would really be awesome is a service that tells you who is following you that you are not following back but should be based on your interests and other people you are following.
http://www.1automationwiz.net/405-twitter-people-that-follow-back/#comment-518
"how long they’ve been inactive for."
FYI Chris. You've got to work on your proper English buddy. No need to put "for" at the end of that sentence.
"how long they’ve been inactive for."
FYI Chris. You've got to work on your proper English buddy. No need to put "for" at the end of that sentence.