Twitter - Your Followers vs. Who You Are Following

In the continuing goal of getting quality followers, there is always the challenge of wanting everyone that you are following to follow you back. That is the way that you build up your list of those who are following you. And if you are promoting yourself or a product, the more people you have following you, the bigger the audience who is listening to what you are saying. If you do not pay attention to the number of people you are following versus the number who are following you, you will notice very quickly that there are more that you are following than following you.

So,it is important to clean things up periodically by removing those who are not following you back. One of reasons to do that is that Twitter will stop you from following more people if the difference between following and follower is too great. While Twitter does not post specifics on this, it is talked about a lot. And the goal is always to make sure that you have more people following you than those you are following. This is especially true as you approach the magically number of 2,000 followers. It seems that Twitter has chosen that number as the point where they limit what you can do if you are following more people than are following you.

Having more people following you than you are following should be the goal of everyone. But as you build up your following, there are going to be times where you are following people with the goal of them following you back. When Twitter stops letting you continue to follow more people, it is time to clean things up. This is where you want to identify and unfollow those people who are not following you back.

You can try and do this using the Twitter interface, but you will quickly see just how tedious this can become. But, there are a number of free solutions to aid in this area and I am going to pass on two that I work with and like. The first is JustUnfollow.com and the other is ManageFlitter.com. Each has its strengths depending on what it is that you need to accomplish.

JustUnfollow is a simple service and when you sign up, you can unfollow up to 25 people per 24 hour period. You can double that to 50 when you try to exceed your limit by Tweeting the message in the pop up window when you exceed the limit. I use this one first whenever I have hit limits in Twitter as a simple way to reduce the number of people I am following so I can continue. You click the unfollow button for each one that you want to unfollow. It is a very simple interface and gets the job done simply and quickly.

ManageFlitter is a more complicated process and allows you to delete much larger numbers of people who are not following you up to 2,000 per day. It starts at 100 per 24 hour period. Once you are signed up, the first thing you will want to do is change the order of those who are not following. By default, it displays the most recent person you are following first. Click the order button and then click on "Follow Order" which will display the oldest person you are following who is not following you. Then you click on the "Fast Select button which will display up to 100 small icons of those you follow who are not following you. To unfollow those who are not following you, you can drag the cursor over the entire list of icons which will highlight them. Then click the Unfollow Selected line to the right. That is all there is to it to remove large numbers. They display up to 100 small icons at a time and for doing bulk removals of those who are not following you, this is a great tool.

Keeping your lists of those you follow clean of those who are not following you back is something that you should be taking a look at on a regular basis. If you are adding those you are following every day, this may become a daily process to go through. And with the goal of having fewer people you are following than those who are following you, these tools will get the job done for you.