If you’ve been on Twitter for awhile, one of the occupational hazards is building up a lengthy list of people who you follow. Some people are friends/colleagues, some are interesting and some good resources.
As well, you may be following people that don’t fall into any of those camps. Somehow along the way, you’ve added them as a courtesy, as part of a service that you wanted to check out, or simply because they followed you.
So how do you clean up your follow list?
One simple approach is Nest Unclutterer, which provides two options:
1. You can block people who have a lot of followers – ostensibly some of these people might be spammers or blatant promoters. Nest Unclutterer offers the option to set the follower threshold so you can block, for example, people following you who follow more than 1,000 people.
Of course, having followers is not a major concern for many people. After all, there’s no pain involved in people want to follow you – other than perhaps being an attractive target for people pushing products or services.
2. You can unfollow people who haven’t posted an update in “X” number of days – the “X” being whatever threshold you want to select.
For both tools, Nest Unclutter makes you confirm the people identified to avoid unfollowing or blocking someone on the keeper list.
Like many services, Nest Unclutterer requires your Twitter username and password. But it’s worth doing if you’re if willing to provide this information to use a simple, yet effective, tool.
For more on Nest Unclutterer, check out this extensive review on ReadWriteWeb.
http://nest.unclutterer.com/
5 Comments
I don't know I understand why blocking people is a big deal. I mean, they are following. So what? Why keep them from my content? Even if they are spammers, I just don't follow them and they can't touch me.
Only thing I can think of is they could RT my stuff to bait to their profile to then spam?
What's your thought on blocking? why do it?
you said it yourself.
You have used "followers" where you meant to use "friends" (or "followees" at least). This makes the above confusing. Making the obvious corrections:
Blocking people who have a lot of friends (i.e. who follow a lot of people) is a bit of a primitive test. There are plenty of such people who aren't spammers. People with a high friends/followers ratio (who follow a lot of people but don't have many followers) are much more likely to be spammers. That's the test you should be applying. Even then, I'm not sure of the value of blocking people. How does having spammers as followers affect you? Applying this test before you follow somebody makes a lot more sense…
I use TweetSpinner.com…people that you follow that don't follow you back can be purged easily 50 at a time……works great!
Which would be interesting if you followed people only to get them to follow back. I follow people because of what they have to say. Whether or not they follow me back is irrelevant to how interesting I find their content.
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