Tools to manage your Twitter followers

I’m the first to admit that I allow whoever wants to follow me on Twitter to do so. As a Virtual Assistant I don’t want to necessarily limit followers based on any preconceptions on who may be a potential client or someone who will refer me to their friends and associates.

I use SocialOomph to “auto-vet” my followers to save myself time in dealing with the time-consuming task of manually choosing who to follow, block or report as spam. Even the spammers have gotten quite nifty and sharp in posting motivational tweets to their accounts so at a glance it’s difficult to see who’s real and who’s not.

Typically I “clean house” about once a month and when I was notified last week I had reached the 15,000 mark I realized I hadn’t done any Twitter follower management in awhile.

Here are my 3 favorite tools Twitter account management tools:

  1. ReFollow – this tool gets first place as the most useful tool as you can also clean up your accounts based on so many different pieces of criteria (how long it’s been since they last tweeted, no account photo, etc.)
  2. Twitblock – a great tool that will scan your followers and give you a numerical rating to suggest the likelyhood they are spam/bot accounts (use caution though as you may inadvertently report & block someone who is legitimate)
  3. FakeFollowers – this tool will also allow you to block anyone who has never sent you a tweet (though I’m not sure I would do that myself)

As a side note I received a beta invite to TwitManage but every time I tried to scan my accounts for potential spam it constantly “timed out”. I don’t know if it’s due to the number of followers I have or a bug in their system. Therefore, this may or may not be a good service.

Thanks to @AndyCrash and @EvolutionFiles for the suggestions to check out Refollow and FakeFollowers as I had been using Tweepular in addition to TwitBlock.

**NOTE**Tweepular is decent but it’s been very, very unreliable the past several months

After running ReFollow and Twitblock I weaned out nearly 2,000 people. Try it yourself and see who and what is lurking in your follower list!

Twitter account management, such as this, is a perfect task to outsource to a Virtual Assistant. If you need assistance with this or other Social Media tasks contact me.