This post is about why you should be using UnTweeps.com to un-follow people that have not tweeted for a long time and therefore cleansing your account.
After you have created an account and start following people many of them will follow you back; this was my simple formula to grow my followers as described in a previous post. If you keep following new people and keep your account active, by tweeting regularly and reasonably often, you can get to a point that your followers naturally grow to the hundreds or thousands. My general policy about following/followers is trying to have a good ratio where followers are more than the people you follow. Considering that the initial scenario for all non-celebrity mortals is to follow more people than they have followers the natural question that arises is: “who shall I un-follow?”
The simplest answer is: “people that have a dormant account, those that have been weeks or months without a single tweet”; why bother keep following them if they are not doing anything on Twitter? A simple tool that offers just this simple function is UnTweeps.com a web app which, once authenticated your account with Twitter.com, lists people that have not tweeted for a certain period of time (default is 30 days). I usually try to be a bit more tolerant and set the time to 60 days. When I just did it earlier today I found 400 (!) people that have not issued a single tweet in 60+ days (some of them 6 months) out of my 4600+ people I was following. UnTweeps.com displays a list of these people with a tick-box next to each of them so you can inspect and decide who you’d like to un-follow.
There are many other tools that allow sophisticated analysis of followers, following, their habits and general classifications. In my opinion, the simple rule of thumb of un-following inactive users, simplifies enormously my decision and the whole task.
I’ve never really understood any of the logic behind this. What harm does it do to follow people who are dormant? It probably happens quite often that I go for a couple of months without tweeting. Does that make me any less interesting than if I were to tell the world every time I take a dump?
If anything, I’m inclined to unfollow the most *prolific* tweeters, not the least prolific.
Many people that approach Twitter do not have idea what to do with it and I give here some guidances that are the the same I appply to my behaviour. From my point of view I think that there is value in keeping the number of followers higher that the number of people you follow. Considering that, unless you are a celebrity, you will always start following more people that follow you my simplest strategy about reducing the number of people I follow is to unfollow people that do not tweet for some time. If you are taking a decision on an individual or a handful of individuals it is one thing but when we talk hundreds at a time you need a rule that is simple to apply and to implement. It works for me 😉