Spring cleaning follower lists on Twitter
Originally published at The Preternatural Post. Please leave any comments there.
It’s amazingly easy for role players to hit limits on Twitter. That’s why so many RP characters have “jailed accounts”. One limit, role players commonly hit but don’t always deal with in a logical and planned way is Twitter’s limits on followers. And given that it’s spring, and Friday, we thought we’d take a look at some tools to help you clean up your follower lists.
Although you may care how many followers you have Twitter doesn’t. The number of followers any one account/profile/character can have is unlimited. Twitter controls things from the other side, limiting the number of people any one account can follow.
The first limit, and the one role players hit most frequently, is following 2,000 people. This doesn’t mean you dead in your tracks when you hit the magic number. Two thousand is more a line in soft sand that a brink wall of even a chasm. Once you follow 2,000 accounts, Twitter begins limiting the number of other people you can follow based on your ratio of followers to following. There are both daily and overall limits that come into play after you top 2,000.
Although the 2,000 and other limits don’t bring you to a screeching halt when it comes to following people, they can serve as useful reminders that it might be time to take a look at who you are following and whether you still want to follow them. This is especially true for role players because some characters can go inactive, get killed off or turn into something you don’t like without really being noticed. In addition, role play accounts can be flipped to new characters easily. The swift rise and fall of families and groups on Twitter can contribute to this level of chaos.
The best place to start cleaning out the list of who you are following is with an application or service that will identify who unfollowed you. There are several available. The most popular is probably Who Unfollowed Me on Twitter but it is by no means the only one.
Who Unfollowed Me on Twitter
As the name implies, Who Unfollowed Me on Twitter checks for changes in your follower list when you sign into the site using your Twitter ID. It then generates a list of people who are no longer following you. It even tells you which ones you are following and give you the option to unfollow them (turn around is fair play, right?). It doesn’t stop there, however, you can also discover who you follow that isn’t following you back and vice versa (who follows you that you don’t follow back).
Friend or Follow
Friend or Follow is similar to Who Unfollowed Me but doesn’t require you to sign in using your Twitter ID. In fact, all you have to do is put in a twitter user name and it will identify who they follow that doesn’t follow them back or who follows them that they don’t follow. It also, identifies those fortunate folks whom are both followed and followers and, while many of the folks are people you interact with or role play with on a regular basis, there may also be a few surprises.
Goodbye, Buddy
If you’re one of those people who actually tries keeping a handle on your following and follower lists, or maybe, having just spent a day going through them cleaning stuff up and NEVER want to to that again, Goodbye, Buddy is for you. After you sign in with you Twitter account, this handy dandy application used to, an hopefully will again soon, send you daily DMs (direct messages) informing you of who among you followers unfollowed you that day.
Qwitter
Qwitter is very similar to Goodbye, Buddy except that instead of having to check the website or getting a Dm, Qwitter sends you an email once a week.
Just Unfollow
In purpose, nothing separates Just Unfollow from the other applications already mentioned above. You sign in with your Twitter account and in generates two lists: one of non-followers and one of fans. So far so good. What really makes Just Unfollow stand out is the presentation. It looks very similar to two Twitter lists with avatars/avis, Twitter usernames and basic data (numbers of followers, number they are following, number of tweets) and most conveniently a red Unfollow or blue Follow button. But the best part is how they are listed with unfollowers displayed from oldest to newest and while the newest fans are displayed first.
Spring cleaning is rarely fun. If you haven’t kept an eye on your follower and following lists, best prepare your ego for a beating before jumping into one of these apps or even attempting to clean things up without one. The good news is, once you discover how quick and easy these apps make cleaning up your follower and unfollower lists, you’ll be prone to use it much more often.
Now get out there and get to cleaning! Your fans and fellow role players will thank you for it!