Monday 21 July 2014

Spring Cleaning My Twitter Account

I tried to follow someone on Twitter the other day and received a message to say that I was unable to follow any more accounts right now. The last time I received that message was four years ago when I was first building my Twitter following and hit the 2,000 ceiling. If you don't know, Twitter has in place a system which prevents aggressive following. If you hit 2,000 follows and have fewer than 1,800 followers you can't follow any more until your follower numbers catch up. There is basically a 10% leeway between follow and follower numbers. When I received the message the other day I was following around 5,900 and had around 5,300 followers.

The answer to my problem was to do a cleanup. In the past I have used a tool called Twitter Kharma but this time when I tried to load it, it never fully loaded so I went to Google to search for an alternative. I found a web-based utility called Tweepi. This tool seems to work really well. The approach I took was to unfollow anyone who hasn't tweeted for a very long time. By removing anyone who hadn't tweeted in more than two years I reduced the number of members I was following by around 1,400 accounts! Why was I following so many useless accounts? I can fully blame my follow activity from all those years ago. I was recommended a follow back tool at the time which automated my follow backs. I don't use these utilities anymore and now that I know better would definitely think better of them.

What has your experience of Twitter following been?

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8 comments:

Faith said...

I use a tool that allows me to unfollow people that unfollow me. I can also use it to unfollow people that are inactive or follow people that have similar interests. I think it's really cool to have control over my Twitter account!

Unknown said...

My Followers are like 250 or something LOL I have a long way to go :)

Deborah said...

I've never heard of Tweepi. I use Tweet Adder and can unfollow those who don't follow me, or follow back those who follow. I'm not a big user of Twitter anyway, although I should be, I guess.

Lesley said...

I think I need to use Tweeti, I've had my Twitter account for years and years, it could use a cleaning.

Clara said...

I didn't know they place a limit, but I was using justunfollow to get rid of the dead weight. It let's you do 100 a day for free.

Yvonne Roga said...

I am forever cleaning up my Twitter account. I use an iPhone app called JustUnfollow. It's great because it works for Twitter and for Instagram. You can see how followed, unfollowed and you can find people to follow.

Aduke Schulist said...

I don't recall which website I used, but I saw somebody had mentioned it.. I was able to clear up my list pretty quickly. I have a similar thing for instagram but it's an app. I am slowly building my followers on both.

Unknown said...

I use justunfollow too, and love it! I realize that early on, I followed a lot of people just because. Now I'm very selective.

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