How to Clean Your Twitter Account with This Free Tool
Our Twitter account needs a good cleaning. The people we follow outnumber the people who follow us. And that’s OK. Still, we want to weed the list to remove anyone who isn’t active. A colleague tells us about ManageFlitter, so we give it a go.
ManageFlitter offers three plans including a free one. The free plan allows you to clean up your with a limit of daily unfollows and search accounts to find new people to follow.
Working the unfollow
Login was a breeze since it connected to our @Akruto Twitter account. The first thing we looked for were accounts with no image. Zero. Next, we looked at inactive users where we learned that we followed 120 people who tweet less than one time per day. We cut them loose.
We peeked at those who are listed as non-English. Since most of these are bilingual, we carefully reviewed their bios and tweets before deciding what action to take. Finally, we check out those not following back.
What’s cool about ManageFlitter is that it lets you exclude verified, protected, and popular accounts from the list. For example, we don’t expect the official @Twitter, @Microsoft, and @Android to follow back. We continue following all three because they share useful information. We haven’t seen this time-saving feature in other Twitter management apps.
Excluding verified and popular accounts narrows the list to about half. We looked at tweets per day sorted from high to low. Some accounts have way too many tweets per day. They dominate the Twitter stream. We nix a few of these based on their bios and photos (if not a person or company logo).
We check out spam score. The highest is 15 percent. Again, we check out the bios and decide from there. Date of last activity appears in most views. Anything more than a few months old is ripe for cutting. (We kept in mind that some may be on break. Hence, we studied their bios and tweets.)
Remember you can add people you don’t follow to lists. If you need to lower your following count, you can move some accounts like @Microsoft and @Android to a list to be able to find them. We could create a private list for “Not following” and put them in there. That will have to be done in Twitter or in another tool. ManageFlitter doesn’t have an option for managing lists.
Every category comes with sort and display options. Three of the four display options have a mouseover feature. Move the mouse pointer over any account to view that person’s bio and other info as shown in Image 1.
Refer to Image 2 for the most detailed display option. Mouseover doesn’t work in this one even though bios don’t appear in this view.
ManageFlitter displays the last tweet and the date of the tweet. It also has icons to speed the weeding process. To learn what each icon means, move the mouse pointer over these features on the left sidebar for a tooltip.
All in all, we unfollowed 150 accounts. Although we could unfollow more, it’s enough for now. Besides, Twitter doesn’t like it when it sees too much action on an account.
Finding more people to follow
This free plan feature isn’t as powerful as cleanup. Initially, “Account Search” only shows a single search box for everything. It’ll return too many results. For a more effective search, select “refine” to see more search options as Figure 3 shows.
The bio field is great for finding professionals or people with an interest in something such as mobile or security. Again, use the sort feature to help you pinpoint ideal people to follow. Want to find people in your area? Enter that in the “Location” field.
A good way to use this search is to enter hashtags that the people you follow tend to use. We often connect with people who tweet about #android, #iphone, #windowsphone, #mobile, #privacy, and #security. We’ve also participated in a couple of Twitter chats. We try the chat’s hashtag to find more people to follow.
ManageFlitter excels in helping you find accounts to unfollow. It’ll restore balance in your follower / following ratio and clean your Twitter stream. We feel more at ease after flitting the dusty accounts.
Some apps’ free plan have too many limitations that it’s not worth the effort. And some have slow performance as they give higher priority to paid accounts. (Understandable.) Not ManageFlitter.
The web-based tool simplifies the unfollow process with its sort options and categories. Nothing fazes it, not even accounts that follow thousands of people. A colleague who follows more than 10k accounts shaved more than 200 in one sitting using ManageFlitter.
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