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You need to prune in order to grow your social followers

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.

A small table top bonsai.
Photo credit: Wikipedia

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.

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Chris Abraham

Chris Abraham, digital strategist and technologist, is a leading expert in digital: search engine optimization (SEO), online relationship management (ORM), Internet privacy, Wikipedia curationsocial media strategy, and online public relations with a focus on blogger outreachinfluencer engagement, and Internet crisis response, with the digital PR and social media marketing agency Gerris digital. [Feel free to self-schedule a 15-minute call, a 30-minute call, or a 60-minute call with me] A pioneer in online social networks and publishing, with a natural facility for anticipating the next big thing, Chris is an Internet analyst, web strategy consultant and adviser to the industries' leading firms. Chris Abraham specializes in web technologies, including content marketing, online collaboration, blogging, and consumer generated media.  Chris Abraham was named a Top 50 Social Media Power Influencer by Forbes, #1 PR2.0 Influencer by Traackr, and top-10 social media influencers by Marketwire; and, for what it’s worth, Chris has a Klout of 79 the last time he looked. Chris Abraham started doing web development back in 1994, SEO in 1998, blogging in 1999, influencer engagement in 2003, social media strategy in 2005, blogger outreach in 2006, and Wikipedia curation in 2007. Feel free to self-schedule a 15-minute call, a 30-minute call, or a 60-minute call. If you want to know the services that Chris offers check out Services If you want to work with Chris use the Contact Form You're welcome to follow me via Social Media You can learn more about Chris over in About Chris writes a lot so check out the Blog Chris offers webinars so check Events

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