Is it time to prune your Twitter garden? Credit: Winter pruning Granton Vineyard Tasmania by stefano lubiana wines
3 tools to help you master the art of unfollowing
Target audience: Marketers, social media influencers, businesses, brands.
Clients, colleagues and my friends all want to increase their follower count. In a world where @Lady Gaga has 25 million souls following her @ladygaga Twitter profile, we’re all in it for the numbers. Not everyone wants lots and lots, some want the right followers. To them, that usually means being discerning when it comes to following someone back. What I do is absolutely follow everyone back to follows me at @chrisabraham.
There’s another option that not many people actually do on a regular basis: pruning the dead leaves and branches away from the little bonsai or the mighty oak you call your Twitter profile.
UnTweeps: Unfollow unloyal followers
I started with UnTweeps, a tool that allowed me to unfollow any and all followers who have not tweeted in X-number of days. I started with 30 days and worked up from there. There’s a free version as well as a very inexpensive subscription or single-pay model you can conveniently pay for using PayPal (3-day non-recurring subscription for $1.37, 1 month non-recurring subscription for $6.49, monthly recurring subscription for only $5 and a 1 year non-recurring subscription for $35).
ManageFlitter: Strategic filtering
Next, I explored ManageFlitter, a tool that also allows you to strategically follow, unfollow and white-list folks depending on their not following you back, not having a profile image (just a default egg), having a non-English-speaking profile, being inactive for more than 30 days, being overly talkative, overly quiet or having a “bad ratio,” which is to say, when an account follows way more people than follows it back. I really like ManageFlitter for its versatility. It offers most of its functions for free but I recommend contributing some to their project, and there are quite a few added functions if you become a pro member — $12/month for one user and $24/month for two to five users. What’s really cool with MF is that they offer a thing they call “Google+ To Twitter,” which allows all Google Plus posts to cross-post to Twitter — with a host of amazing settings.
JustUnfollow: Inactive tweeps? You’re dismissed!
Finally, I fell for JustUnfollow, which is much more than just unfollowing. It’s quick and easy, simple to use and makes it easy to handily dismiss all the folks who are not following me back or are inactive. I am a pro on there as well, and I am very happy with the ease of use and quickness of the app. A pro account costs $9.99/year for a single user but I have a five-user account for $24.99/year.
I ended up pruning around 38,000 followers. Yes, the result of that means that a lot of people are unfollowing me, too. I have gone from having almost 48,000 followers on Twitter to 45,000. But, I really needed to groom and prune because in the race toward more followers I ended up getting lots and lots of weeds, vines and underbrush, basically strangling out air, space and sun. Pruning may be what you need, too, to keep your Twitter profile in good health.
Articles on Twitter tools
• How to use Twitter to monitor your brand (Socialbrite)
• 7 top tools to measure performance & influence on Twitter (Socialbrite)
• Best Twitter dashboards (Socialbrite)Chris Abraham is a partner in Socialmedia.biz. Contact Chris via email, follow him on Twitter and Google Plus or leave a comment below.
Maybe I should take some time off and do some twitter-pruning myself. Just to make my Twitter breathe a little better. I'll definitely check out your tips here, and start from there. Cheers!
….and when you keep your soil rich with content the stems of your garden will be strong and the resulting flowers, prized.
I have not used UnTweeps, thank you for enlightening me but I have used JustUnfollow and ManageFlitter, which is my favorite.
I haven't tried Un Tweeps tool yet , would like to give a try thanks for mentioning it here
I've been looking for some tools to do just this – thanks for all the options!
Untweeps is the best tool i ever used. i am using this to manage my loyal and unloyal followers. loved this post thanks for increasing my knowledge.
Just came across this post. I’m the founder of JustUnfollow.com .Thanks a lot for mentioning us here! We’re working on a new version that will have some major improvements over the current one.
We launched our Android app last month and users have been downloading it at a crazy rate everyday. This month we intend to launch our iPhone app as well! Lots of exciting things to look forward to.
justunfollow.com is a nice tool. but as it has a limitation for free users i looked for more. the ultimate suitable 1 i have found is http://unfollow.2et.in ….what is your opinion about it ?
I use http://followerfilter.com/ for Searching User- Tweet RT and Favorite listing and deletion – Unfollower finding an deletion. Even the site is new, it works well! Site also allows you to see any twitter user’s (included yours) unfollowers, followers and followings without login. Of course it’s free and unlimited!