By Sree Sreenivasan
DNAinfo Contributing Editor
Power users of Twitter regularly add new people to the list of folks they follow. And just as regularly, they unfollow people whose tweets are irrelevant, too frequent or just boring. They not only use HootSuite or TweetDeck as their new inboxes, but they constantly add and remove the voices to make Twitter more useful.
There are several tools out there to help Twitter users weed and trim their follow list.
Here's the tool I use: ManageFlitter.com: a terrific way to see specific kinds of followers - those who don’t follow you; those who have no profile picture; those who are inactive, etc. The company says it has processed 57 million unfollows for 140,000 users by the end of September, up from 10 million unfollows for 50,000 users in mid-May.
Other tools I've tried:
FriendOrFollow: see who’s following you among those you follow and who you’re not following among those who follow you.
Tweepi: sort of a Twitter contact management system. It's a play on slang for toilet paper and carries the metaphor forward with services like "Geeky Flush" and "Geeky Cleanup."
Back in September, I wrote about the new version of Twitter, which does a much better job of encouraging new follows. I'll be interested in seeing if #NewTwitter will encourgae more activity on Twitter.com itself (as of April 2010, only 25 percent of Twitter activity took place on Twitter.com).
One of the reasons Twitter is so popular is that its open infrastructure allows third-party developers to create applications of various kinds. There are thousands of such apps, with more coming every day. A good place to find them is at OneForty.com, which lets you discover and rate these tools (founded by Laura Fitton - @Pistachio - and the co-author of "Twitter for Dummies"). A small list of Twitter tools for media folks is on my social-media guide, which I update on a regular basis.
Over the next few months, I will visit the topic of making sense of the Twitter ecosystem, starting today with how to track your clean up your list of followers and followees (not sure that's an office Twitter word).
In a future column, I'll talk about tools that tell you who specifically has unfollowed you, but that's pretty explosive stuff and I share that info in classes and workshops only after warning that some people need require counseling when using those tools.
Related Columns:
- Turning Down the Noise on Twitter
- Twitter Myths and Misconceptions
- Why Profile Photos Matter - Is Yours Appropriate?
Every week, DNAinfo contributing editor Sree Sreenivasan, a Columbia journalism professor, shares his observations about the changing media landscape.
