I’ve said it many times before: if you want your Twitter profile to be strong and if you want to develop both influence and clout, you’ll need to prune your Twitter following as rigorously as you would a prize Bonsai. While it’s important to have followers, it’s equally important to have room to breathe and room to follow.
I used to support following everyone back equally, resulting in following the same 10,000 that follow you but I don’t feel that way anymore.
While I don’t feel like one needs to have the same ratio as I do, I do think it’s important to have as much room as possible so that we can aggressively follow the people we want to follow us with the goal of following us back.
While I love to organically earn people’s following, I personally use my own Twitter account, @chrisabraham, to help get me into the attentionsphere of the people I want to influence. And I can’t really just wait until those people discover me solely through my own hashtags, language, keywords, and links.
So, I use an assortment of tools, apps, and services to winnow down all the folks who I do follow but who no longer — or never did — follow me back or in the first place.
ManageFlitter
While possibly the most expensive, ManageFlitter is also the most valuable. Unlike Crowdfire and SocialOomph, ManageFlitter has found the best Twitter TOS loophole: Remote Action Management.
RAM is awesome because you get to outsource all of that manual unfollowing, all that click-click-clicking, to a human person who does it for you but you never have to meet ever or interact with.
But it’ll cost you: order a business class account for $49/month and you’ll get spotted 10,000 “RAM actions.”
They do roll-over, month-after-month, but if you want or need more, you’ll need to pay $10 for another 10,000 or, if you’re managing a Twitter profile with hundreds of thousands of followers needing tens of thousands of actions, you can get 22,222 actions for $100 or 285,714 actions for $1,000.
One action represents a single follow or unfollow. Simple.
I upped my game to the next level that offers 5 Twitter profile accounts, the $119/month account that comes with 24,000 RAM actions-a-month, including rollover.
One of the greatest things about ManageFlitter plus automagic RAM actions is that you can create elaborate, persistent, and automatic follow, unfollow, and block rules that you can set and forget — something that SocialOomph does gorgeously as well — though if you have enough RAM actions purchased in advance, only ManageFlitter allows you to set it and forget it.
If you fire and forget SocialOomph, it’ll queue up hundreds and hundreds of potential follow, unfollow, and block actions that you’ll eventually have to personally attend to at some point.
SocialOomph
I use SocialOomph personally as a way to pepper evergreen tweets on behalf of @chrisabraham and my clients. In addition to that, SocialOomph also offers Google+ cross-posting and search-based, keyword-based, and profile-based following tools.
Unfortunately, Twitter’s TOS disallows both automatic follow-back as well as automatic follow based on keywords. Instead, SocialOomph collects a queue of hundreds and hundreds of prospective people to follow, including the Twitter Lists you could add them to.
It’s a full-featured tool but lacks the auto feature.
But, after using SocialOomph for a hundred years, I found an intentional hack that the SocialOomph team has double-secretly added to the queue to make it much easier for me to gently get away with Twitter Murder.
SocialOomph’s follow queue initially uses radio buttons to make it impossible to “check all” and just power through them all. But double secretly, if you triple secretly skip past a few pages, you’ll see that that accept radio button secretly turns into a check box, allowing the sneaky and persistent SocialOomph user to get his speed on, throwing Twitter TOS caution to the wind!
If you download this awesome Check All tool and install it onto your Chrome Browser, you’ll then be able to quadruply-secret check them all up and follow them all in a sort-of giant batch to your heart’s content! It’s not nearly as awesome or efficient as ManageFlitter’s RAM actions, but it’s cheaper and sneakier!
Sneaky is sexy.
Shhhhh, don’t tell either SocialOomph or Twitter that I told you this secret — don’t tell Twitter especially!
Crowdfire
Crowdfire is fun. There’s an awesome app for both iOS and Android and it’s super fun to click all of those red buttons! Click, click, click! So much fun (shown below but turned on its side for amusement purposes only)
I personally spend $19.99/month for the Earth Plan, but this is recent as I have recently added a couple-few more Twitter accounts to my Crowdfire account.
Until recently, I only paid $9.99 Pluto plan, which offers everything but for only one Twitter account. Aside from the fact that Crowdfire isn’t persistent, it’s very powerful and allows one to search for people based on things that have written in their bios, their tweets, and even location. And if and when you use location, use quite a few different ways of locating: Arlington Virginia, Arlington VA, 22202, 22204, etc.
Of course I also use HootSuite, Buffer, and GaggleAMP as well, but when it comes to controlling, containing, and taming my bushy bush bush of a bushy bush of a Twitter profile, @chrisabraham, I use ManageFlitter, SocialOomph, and Crowdfire for all my manscaping.
Now it’s your turn, you bushy bush bush of a bushy bush! Go git ’em, Tiger!
