I reported that I was changing who I follow on Twitter the other week. The short story is that I had been using an auto-follower tool that reciprocated anyone following me on Twtitter. I realised that this simply attracted lots of spam and that I wanted to clean up my Twitter presence a bit and regain some micro-blogging sanity.
How to bulk unfollow on Twitter?
It's no mean feat to go through 5,000 followers and sift out the good, bad and ugly. I couldn't have done this without a very useful tool provided by Tweepi. This software pulls up all your Twitter followers and categorizes them very neatly by when they last tweeted, what they tweet about and how likely they are to be spammers. You probably want to check it out yourself, there are lots of data to go through and analyze.
Hold down that shift key
Based on this information you can bulk unfollow people by simply holding down the old shift key and clicking a bit. Some of you will know that unfollowing more than one user at the time isn't possible on Twitter itself, for reasons unknown to me. This feature on Tweepi must have saved me a good few hours and I am very thankful for that and hereby recommend Tweepi to anyone looking to flush some spammy Twitter followers.
Another nifty feature of Tweepi is the fact that you can easily unfollow folks that unfollow you. It's typically a a manual job to see who has quit following you but Tweepi will tell you straight away and you can choose to flush these people there and then. I expect Tweepi to help a few people to unfollow me shortly in other words…
What I was left with…
My new criteria for following people on Twitter are either that I know them well (online/offline) or that I believe I can learn from them. This has pulled my ratios down fairly drastially and I only follow about 250 users nowadays – maybe I went a bit far here but it just had to be done.
Did I lose any followers?
As you would expect, I have lost about 500 followers already and I expect another 500 at least to go soon. This was expected all along and an analysis of who the quitters were (kindly provided by NutshellMail) indicate that these followers are complete spam bots anyway so good riddance. So yep, lost followers but didn't lose any sleep over it.
Some folks were less than impressed
I have had a couple of people tweeting to say that they are disappointed I have unfollowed and one person said he doesn't play the follow/unfollow game (and then he unfollowed me). This is only fair enough, although I haven't set out to pump'n'dump, this is certainly how things can be perceived.
Final thoughts
I'm really happy with my decluttering of spammers on Twitter. For once I can actually enjoy watching my homefeed and happily interact with anyone on it. I continue to follow more people (a few a week) completely organically as outlined above.
I hope your Twitter state of affairs never get to the point mine were but if they do – you now know what your options are!
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