Clients, colleagues, and my friends all want to increase their follower count. In a world where Lady Gaga has 25,555,017 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 who follows me at @chrisabraham. There’s a fourth option that not many people actually do routinely: pruning the dead leaves and branches away from the little bonsai or your might oak you call your Twitter profile.
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 (three-day non-recurring subscription, $1.37, one-month non-recurring subscription, $6.49, Monthly recurring subscription, only $5.00, and one-year non-recurring subscription, $35.00)
Then, I explored ManageFlitter, another tool that allows one 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, following way more people than follow-back. I really like it 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 2-5 users. What’s really cool with MF is that they offer a thing they call “Google+ To Twitter” which allows all G+ posts to cross-post to Twitter — with a host of amazing settings.
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. Pro is $9.99/year for a single user but I have a 5-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, tweetscape, and prune because in the race towards more followers I ended up getting lots and lots of weeds, vines and underbrush, basically strangling out both the air, space, and sun that can help, in the end, make and keep my Twitter profile in good health.
