Follower management on Twitter

Why you need to do it.

In order to reduce spammy "following", Twitter has a rule that applies to all accounts which follow more than 2000 people:

Your "following" number must be no more than 10% higher than your "followers" number.

Example A: following 2001; followers 1700 ==> You will NOT be allowed to follow anyone new.
Example B: following 2001; followers 1897 ==> You are ok.
Example C: following 8700; followers 8000 ==> You are ok.

Tip [if you're unable to follow more people at this time]: my suggestion is to start unfollowing some of the people who aren't following you. See below for how to do this most efficiently.

Tip [if you want to avoid this problem in the future]: make sure to maintain your "following" number at less than, or at least not much more than, your "followers" number, so you don't wind up having to spend a lot of time some day unfollowing people.

Follower management tool: the ideal

The ideal follower management tool would enable you to:

-quickly see at a glance all accounts which you are following but are not following you back, and any lists of yours on which they appear;
-check off which accounts should be unfollowed and/or removed from lists; and
-whitelist and hide those which you are willing to continue to follow even if they do not follow you back.

If you know of any such tool, please let me know. I haven't found it yet.

Follower management tools which do exist

The follower management tool I use the most is refollow.com. I started using the paid version, and can't remember what the difference is between the paid and the free version. What's cool about it is it has filters, and the ability to "lock" -- i.e. whitelist -- those accounts you're willing to follow even if they don't reciprocate. So you don't have to keep looking at those each time. And it's very easy to unlock an account whenever you want to. Refollow also has other useful filters which might help you weed out things, such as, e.g., the number of days of someone's last tweet. So, e.g., if you want to remove accounts that haven't tweeted in 90 days, refollow makes it easy to do. You can't actually unfollow with it unless you're using their paid version; you have to click on the account's name, which takes you to twitter.com, where you do the actual unfollowing. An advantage of refollow is you can view quite a number of icons all at once in a very handy format. A disadvantage is it takes around a minute or two to load all of the accounts you're following. An advantage of refollow is that it also provides list management as well as follower management.


The "Cleanup" Tool offered by tweetfindtools.com provides you with a list of all people you're following who are not following you back, and you can check off the ones you want to unfollow. It only allows you to view 100 accounts at a time, and it provides no "whitelisting" or "safelisting" or "hiding" or "locking", so that if there are some accounts you're willing to follow, whether they follow you or not, their avatar will come up each time, wasting your time. [tweefindtools seems to have a very responsive development team, and I think they're working on adding a whitelist]


Another follower management tool I've used is who.unfollowed.me (h/t @klbkultur). This gives you a report of who unfollowed you, and the ability to unfollow them. Importantly it separates those you're following from those you're not. One thing I don't care for is they suggest tweeting that you've found a bunch of accounts who've unfollowed them, and you "know who they are"... I think it would be really dumb to send out such a tweet. They used to have daily reports, so that if you were off the site for a week, you could come back and find out everything that had transpired during the whole week; they do not presently have that feature.

3 other useful follower management tools, each of which loads quickly and gives you a good overview of the peeps who you're following who are not following you back:

-friendorfollow.com
-justunfollow.com (h/t @rM1L)
-Tweepi (h/t @Penny_Wyse)

justunfollow.com has whitelisting but limits the whitelisting to 500 accounts. So if you're only whitelisting 500 or less, you're good to go. It's added the ability to unfollow inactive accounts, too.

Tweepi likewise has a safelist which you can't hide, which makes it almost useless. It lists the peeps 20 to a page, which wouldn't be a problem if it had a hideable safelist, but which is a nightmare without it.

Friendorfollow, who.unfollowed.me, and justunfollow present the view in a nice, usable manner, with a large number listed per page, but provide no whitelist at all.

Other tools helpful in follower management are:

rssfriends.com (h/t MariKurisato): provides you with an rss feed of all follows & unfollows; very helpful, can be followed through Outlook email.
DoesFollow: most reliable way of finding out whether a particular single account is or is not following.
Twitcleaner (invokes various interesting criteria for unfollowing, such as spamminess, inactivity, potentially boring, repetitiveness, lack of substance, lack of engagement, etc.)
followerhub.com

[If you know of others which work well, or if any of my information has become outdated, or if you have any additional information on this evolving subject, please let me know in the Comments section, and I'll check it out. Thanks.]

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