Manage Twitter Followers with Ease

By TwitterFools Editorial Staff, December 9th, 2009 in Tools | Comments

Somehow the words ‘managing followers’ don’t feel like a natural fit with the social media ethos of share and share alike. But it is a reality on social networks like Twitter – no matter what you call it. If it feels better to you, you can think of it as ‘cultivating.’ Finding good and great tweeps to engage and occasionally removing those who, for whatever reason, won’t bear healthy fruit. Refollow is a follow management tool we briefly mentioned a few months back. But recently it was time for us to do some cultivating of our own and after using Refollow and its latest upgrades it only seemed right that we tell you about its ease of use and many benefits.

When do you need to ‘manage’ your Twitter followers?

If you regularly attend to your Twitter friends and followers list you probably won’t need to use a tool like Refollow. You already know that to get the most out of Twitter you want to friend and followed by active and engage people so you probably groom your list regularly. But, if you are like us, you sometimes get distracted by other priorities. In our case, it had been about 2 months since we looked carefully at our Twitter friends and followers and it was about time.

In general, it is good practice to employ your favorite follower management tool:

- Once every 30 – 60 days, or
- If you ever set your Twitter account to auto follow and you recognized the folly in that

Since we mentioned Refollow in our post How to Manage Your Twitter Friend List the tool has undergone some nice improvements. But, one of Refollow’s most convenient features, its interface, has been a consistent winner. It creators have placed all the filter and sorting options and action buttons on a single screen rather than require the user to navigate multiple pages. Because of this, we recommend you take a moment to study the home screen to familiarize yourself with Refollow’s many options.

refollow-interface

We logged in with our Twitter credentials and Refollow quickly loaded 100 of our friends and followers as noted on the right side of the panel. For our intended task we asked Refollow to import our whole list. If you have many thousands of followers, the loading process can take some time, but it is worth it.

Importing everyone was important to our purpose as we wanted to ensure we were following all the good tweeps who had followed us, a task we hadn’t attended to in a while. [sorry 'bout that!] After everyone was loaded we simply filtered the list to show us those who followed us but we weren’t following in return. In practice it was a simple click of a filter box at the top of the app. The results were almost instantaneous.

From here it is possible to simply select all and hit follow, but we weren’t that quick on the draw. We’ve found that many, but not all, spammers on Twitter won’t upload their picture. So, with another quick tick in a filter box, we were able to show only tweeps with pictures. Presented now with what felt like a better list to follow Refollow offered yet another feature that allowed us to investigate a little deeper. Hovering over an avatar invokes a pop up with important details to aid in your follow decision.

These are actually tweeps we follow but it illustrates the pop up info

As you move through your list you can select and follow tweeps individually, or if you feel the list looks clean, you can bulk follow them. Refollow can take a few minutes to process bulk follow or unfollow commands and provides a progress tally in the bottom right of the interface. We found that if we tried to perform a new filtering task while a process was running Refollow prompts you with a friendly reminder to give it a minute.

Using Refollow we also easily identified those peeps we follow but don’t follow us back. In some cases we held on to those folks, but in other cases it was quick and easy to say ’so long.’ For those we decided to hang on to Refollow offers a ‘lock’ that safeguards the profile should we inadvertently select all and hit the unfollow button. A nice safety precaution for those of us who are click happy. You know who you are…

Its also important to note that when we reviewed the list of our followers we weren’t following and looked at the tweeps who didn’t have a picture we found some unsavory folks indeed. IMHO the with/without picture filter goes a long way to helping reduce our exposure to future Twitter spam.

In truth, we’ve only given you a glimpse at the full power of Refollow. It is a full-fledged Twitter list management and filtering application that includes tagging, commenting and much more. So, if you haven’t managed your Twitter follower list in a while we suggest you give Refollow a try. Like any good gardening tool, it is sharp and efficient.