03 Mar Twitoria Highlights Inactive Twitter Followers
We have a lot of conversations in the office about Twitter followers. We talk about the follow/following ratio, and the delicate balance there in. We talk about the concept of the auto-follow, and whether we support it or not. We talk about who we’re following and why. And we have many soul-searching, lunchtime conversations about the quality of the content we’re tweeting out; our noise, if you will. Is it relevant and interesting? Are we adding value to the Twitter-sphere, or are we just tweeting to hear ourselves tweet?
My mom is on Twitter. Seriously. My mother is the one who convinced me to sign up for Twitter, and she’s been at it for a while. As someone who has been on the cutting edge of publishing and communications for years, she saw its value and potential early on. And now that we follow each other on Twitter, I don’t tweet anything that wouldn’t pass mom muster. My mom, as much as she loves me, does not care that I am brushing my teeth. She would, however, be interested in information about a new Twitter tool, or Twitpics of a recent night out at a new Raleigh restaurant.
And likewise, I want to follow people who have engaging and pertinent tidbits to add to the conversation. I don’t want to be in it just for the numbers, like some junior high school popularity contest.
In order to prevent a numbers game, I like to do a clean sweep of my followers and who I’m following every so often, so I was excited to discover Twitoria, created by @andrethegiant. It’s a tool that helps you to see which of your followers have been quiet and for how long. That way, if you want to purge followers who haven’t tweeted in a month or two, you don’t have to go through each individual one and check. That gets ridiculous when you build up your numbers, and using Twitoria takes about 15 seconds.
It’s also an effective way to filter out people that post no content, that follow you just for the return follow, or that have abandoned their Twitter accounts. Another thing that’s important to me is that I don’t have to sign up for the service, nor do I have to give up my email address and wonder what kind of crazy spam is going to wind up clogging my inbox.
I know there are a lot of great tools out there for filtering/tracking/cleaning out followers. Got any favorites?
