Orangejack

I’m not a fan of following everyone who follows me on Twitter. That’s the beauty of the one-way connection point that Twitter allows. You can follow me or vice versa, but it doesn’t have to be reciprocal.

I’m of the opinion that it doesn’t matter how many people want to follow me. It doesn’t effect me. More people, less people, whatever. No campaigns here to ask people to stop following me. The only exception I have is I don’t want spammers following me.

As for who I follow, I use intuition, checks, and tools to help me figure out who I should follow. Over time, these lists swell and sometimes you just gotta trim twitter down a bit on both the following and follower sides. Here are some of the tools I’ve found useful.

Topify – Make an informed decision as soon as someone follows you. Topify sends an email with bio information, latest tweets, etc to help me make a scan and decide if I should ignore them, block them, report them as spam, or follow back. All can be done from the email.

TwitBlock – Find spammers following you and block them. When you use this tool, go through each person one-by-one, don’t assume just because they are listed they are spammers.

UnTweeps – Find people you’re following who haven’t updated in a long time. You may find some here you’ll want to trim. Some you won’t want to trim because you want to know if and when they do update.

FriendOrFollow – Find out who is following you that you may want to follow back. Also find people you’re following who are not following you back. I don’t unfollow just because they don’t follow me back.

I encourage you that if you’re going to use tools to help you trim twitter, still go through each account yourself. Look at each one. Don’t let a tool make a decision for you – let the tool help you make the decision.