Weeding out bad followers on your Twitter

This entry applies to those who are using Twitter as a tool to do whatever it is that you do. If you are not using Twitter, you can skip the entry and go straight to the comment form and tell me that you do not use Twitter... :) ... And if you are a celebrity using Twitter, this entry does not apply to you too...

Assuming that you are using Twitter to promote something, you would need to have lots of followers. In order to have many followers, you have to have something that attracts people to follow you or you can start following as many people as you can and hopefully some would then follow you back in return. The latter since to be a workable method to build up your followers despite that it is a time consuming effort.

But then, there is a problem to that method. Twitter impose a limit to the number of people that you can follow based on some caculated ratio that is only known to them. That means, if you only have 1 or 10 or 100 followers, you could only follow up to 2000 people. After that, the ratio kicks in and you must have some number of followers before you can follow 2001 people. This is mainly put in place to get rid of spammers and other undesirable people.

So, from time to time you would get people following you and some people, such as I, would then follow them back in the intention of having mutual benefits of following each other. Like anything else in this world, there would be some bad people who would follow you just to get you to follow them back so that they can increase their followers. Once you have followed them, they would them un-follow you so that they can start following someone else and increase their follower again. You would end up with less followers thus you are unable to add more people to follow... Bad eh!

What can you do? I think that there are many tools out there to help you manage this. My favorite is FriendorFollow. This is a site where you can check/do 3 things.

1. People that you are following but they are not following you back


2. People that are following you but you are not following them


3. People that you are following and they are following you back

I make use of no. 1 and 2 a lot. No.1 is for me to remove those who have stopped following me. You don't follow me, why should I follow you unless you have something that I really like.

No. 2 is used when I want to return the favor to those who take the trouble to follow me. But when they misbehaved, I would then use no.1 on them... :)

By using this, I can weed out any bad followers as easy as 1 2 3...

The service is Free! No registration required. Just key in your Twitter ID on the front page and then use the Following, Fans, and Friends Tabs accordingly. You must log on to your Twitter if you need to follow or unfollow someone. FriendorFollow is at http://friendorfollow.com/

Happy Twitting!