1/4/2012
How to Maintain a Community of Relevant Twitter Follows
If you look at my Twitter profile, you’ll see that I’m following about a quarter of the number of people who are following me:
When you see this, you might think, gee, what a snob — but that’s really not the case at all, at least I hope not. What happened is, a while back I made up my mind to get rid of the spammers and other non-relevant follows, so I could actually start paying attention to people who have mutual interests.
Here’s how I nurture a relevant group of follows.
1. Clean Out Spammers with TwitCleaner
TwitCleaner is a phenomenal Twitter utility that allows you to quickly and accurately purge your spam follows. I wrote about TwitCleaner recently – you can learn more about TwitCleaner here. If you haven’t paid attention to your follows, you will be SHOCKED to see how much GARBAGE has piled up in your house.
2. Clean Out Inactive Follows with Tweepi
TwitCleaner doesn’t do a great job of picking folks who are no longer tweeting. To clean out this group, I like Tweepi. It’s a little kludgy compared to TwitCleaner, but it allows you to sort your follows by date of last tweet. Again, you will find this pretty illuminating if you haven’t been paying attention: why follow someone whose last tweet was several months ago or a year ago? Useless clutter. There are several other ways you can sort follows in Tweepi, including …
3. Flush Unfollowers with Tweepi
Generally I don’t follow people who don’t follow me: Tweepi identifies unfollowers and makes it fairly easy to purge them. Not everyone on Twitter sees it like this, but for me, interaction is where I feel real value on Twitter. I don’t need to follow people who aren’t interested in interacting with me. If they are thought leaders, I have lots of other ways to keep tabs on their pronouncements, such as reading their blogs and simply following conversation about them on Twitter from people I follow.
4. Manually Follow Back
Until recently I used SocialOomph to automatically follow back. Then, as I mentioned above, I would use Tweepi and TwitCleaner to clean things up. This got to be rather monotonous and time consuming. So I reverted to following back manually. Although it takes a bit of time, I’m seeing several benefits:
- I can actually spend a few moments checking out the new follow’s profile and get a feel for what they’re all about.
- I can add them to a list in order to follow them more closely.
- I can send them a real, actual, non-automated “nice to meet you” tweet.
All this adds up to more opportunity to real engagement. I still use TwitCleaner and Tweepi, but only once every couple months and there’s not nearly as much to clean up.
5. Follow People Who Talk to My Follows
People who engage are the people I want to connect with. So when I’m on HootSuite and see a follow talking to someone I’m not following, I’m immediately intrigued. Most of the time, the friend of your friend will be your friend.
Over to You
Do you think limiting your follows is helpful? How do you manage your follows to keep them relevant?
Learn more about Twitter marketing. Straight North specializes in B2B, with clients in industries from glass block vents to dust monitoring equipment.
5 Responses to How to Maintain a Community of Relevant Twitter Follows
Some great plug-ins stated here, I was unawarethat Twitter had so many. Shuld prove handy as I often find it hard to distinguish between spammers and genuine followers
Brad,
This is perfect. Proper Twitter usage does require some maintenance but the benefits far outweigh the time investment.
One of the tools that has been helpful to me is justunfollow.com. It has been a great help in weeding out those folks who follow and then immediately unfollow after you follow them back.
Cheers
George
George, Great find with justunfollow. We’ll definitely check that out for clients and the SN Twitter page. Thanks for sharing!
There’s an ongoing debate (I happened upon one just recently on my own blog) as to whether you should set up auto DM replies to new followers or not. I’ve tried both. It’s super easy to automate it and then forget about it but I’ve found that personally responding gets a far better response. When I sent out auto DMs with a “click here for…” offer, it was anyone’s guess as to whether the person would respond. But if I added something personal to the end of that offer based on something I read in the person’s profile, or referenced their website or other relevant detail, it was nearly a given that they would “click here”. So yup, it’s true what they say about the engagement part.
Hi Carol, The DM issue is indeed a big one. I dislike them and haven’t read one in probably a year or more.