Managing Twitter
After five years experimenting with Twitter, dozens of public speaking engagements on the topic, and thousands of followers, I have personally tried endless products that aim to help manage my Twitter followers which is necessary given the shady tactics of spam, bots and jerks. What I have stuck with since its launch is ManageFlitter, not because it has a beautiful user interface (it does not) or because it is the fastest site on the web (it is not), but because it does what I need – quickly.
While the free service allows you to do basic management like unfollow people who are not following you, are inactive, have no profile picture, or have gotten quiet, there is a “Pro Mode” available that also allows users to automatically follow anyone that @ messages you and you can track who unfollows you and when.
The two features I personally use on a weekly basis is to unfollow anyone who is not following me back and anyone who has not tweeted in at least the last six months. Some will disagree with how I use Twitter, but at this point, I use my personal account for (predictably) personal use, not for work, so I allow myself to be more discriminant with who I allow into my private account. Our AGBeat and AgentGenius accounts allow anyone to follow and we follow anyone who is not spam back, so ManageFlitter is less useful for how we manage those accounts.
The ability to check mark everyone not following you back and clicking one button can shed some weight or even make a statement if that is what you are looking to do, but mostly it is helpful to know who has unfollowed you in a particular week, giving you the opportunity to reach out and discover why if it is someone important to you. Recently, I saw that one of my best friends unfollowed me, so I messaged her on Facebook and she swears she didn’t, but thought that I had just gotten quiet on Twitter. It happens.
Check out ManageFlitter for managing your Twitter followers, it couldn’t be simpler.
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