You need to manage Twitter followers connected with your account as they can impact your experience on Twitter significantly. You have to follow the right people or you risk your Twitter experience becoming meaningless.
If you are like most people who just opened a Twitter account, and do not manage their Twitter followers, you likely follow people back as a courtesy. We all know #FollowBackFriday.
It’s #followbackfriday guys come on❤️
— Ꮰαsмιиє 14K ☞🌈 (@jasminesummers_) October 13, 2017
But did those people on Follow Back Friday follow you and then unfollow you right away? Are those who you followed months ago still active? Here are some tools to help you sort out your Twitter follower list, and your important Twitter following/follower ratio.
Manage Twitter followers: Friend or Follow
This Twitter management tool breaks down your followers into three different categories:
- Friends: Anyone that you are following who follows you back.
- Fans: An account which is following you, but you do not follow it back.
- Following: An account which you are following, but it does not follow you back.
You need to log into Friend or Follow with your Twitter account, or create a unique login. This replaces a previous functionality that worked from the homepage, but that feature is no longer available.
Once you do your search the site will display the profile photos of any Twitter accounts you follow, but they do not follow you back. This is all presented in an easy to understand grid, allowing you to easily decide which accounts to follow, or unfollow, as you manage your Twitter followers as you deem necessary.
Drawbacks of Friend or Follow
The main issue is that when you want to unfollow, or follow, accounts you have to click on their avatar and be sent to Twitter. They haven’t managed to do it so that you can operate entirely through their dashboard.
Most of their best features are locked behind a subscription paywall. If you are curious about how the paid features will help you manage your Twitter account you are able to try the full version free for seven days.
Manage Twitter followers: Unfollower Stats
This is quite similar to Friend or Follow, but it has the bonus feature of everything being handled through its dashboard. This can make it slightly faster to manage Twitter followers on your account. Through the dashboard it will help you track:
- Anyone who unfollows you.
- Those who do not follow you back.
- Those who follow you, but you do not follow them.
This is going to help you with those who have significant follower churn. Twitter follower churn is when accounts follow you, wait for the follow back, and then quickly unfollow you.
They have also given their app a responsive design so that it works just as well on your laptop as it does on your mobile device.
Drawbacks of Unfollower Stats
This is a free service which relies entirely upon advertising. They do not have a paid service which supplements their income, it’s all advertising.
Sorry to show this message if you're using ad blocker. But, this is a 'free' service and income doesn't meet with the cost of service. pic.twitter.com/Jg9wbXY9VV
— Unfollower Stats (@unfollowerstats) July 28, 2017
Just keep in mind that this is a free service which is nearly as good as paid services. The money has to come from somewhere…
Manage Twitter followers: Untweeps
The main purpose of Untweeps is to find accounts which you follow, but which are inactive. These inactive accounts will bog down the number of accounts you’re allowed to follow, which Twitter limits to 5000 unless certain numbers of people follow you. If this is a consistent problem for you, get over it by using our Twitter Followers Service so that Twitter will allow you to follow more accounts for genuine follow backs.
Here is how Untweeps works:
- Go to Untweeps.com and authorize them access to your Twitter account.
- Tell the app how many days back you would like to search for inactive accounts.
- If this is your first time using Untweep, it is recommended that you go back to the first day of your Twitter account opening.
- Untweeps will now show you a list of inactive users.
- You can sort the list by how long ago they last tweeted, allowing you to focus on the worst accounts first.
They allow you to unfollow accounts directly from their dashboard. As you can see, it has proven to be quite popular over the years.
Over 375,000 have used https://t.co/fF71oWMAcq to clean their followings.
— UnTweeps (@UnTweeps) July 24, 2016
They also have a number of other useful features:
- A whitelist of users who do not tweet often, but that you know you want to follow for those few pieces of wisdom they share on Twitter. Most people choose celebrities and other Twitter influencers.
- The ability to delete your entire whitelist and start over again if you wish to manage your Twitter account that way.
- Paid features which include deeper Twitter analysis, and multiple account support.
- A list of Twitter users that you have blocked. This could be helpful if you like to block those who tweet about Game of Thrones, or the latest sports game, live. You can unblock them when the season is over.
These features make it even easier to manage your Twitter followers.
Drawbacks of Untweeps
While this site is still working, it appears to no longer be managed. Their Twitter account is dead, which is an ill omen for a site dedicated to Twitter. The person who designed the account, however, Randall Fink, is still active on Twitter and it’s possible that he takes a peek at his creation now and then.
Why you must manage Twitter followers for your account
If you simply want to use Twitter for fun, and don’t care about growing, you will certainly get what you are looking for. This is because your improper management of your account will lead to nothing good happening for you. You can expect some slow growth, for sure, but if you do not manage your Twitter account properly it will stagnate.
There are certainly other Twitter management tools out there besides the three listed, but these three all look at Twitter management from a specific angle as they:
- Identify the accounts that do not follow you back, allowing you to unfollow them.
- Show you inactive users that you can unfollow.
- Give you a list of new Twitter users to follow.
Once you start managing your Twitter followers you will find your account more enjoyable to use, and it’ll probably grow much quicker as you focus on those who actually matter. If you have Twitter management tools that you prefer, feel free to comment below to let us know.