If you’ve been on Twitter for too long, or gone on binges where you follow too many people at once, you can end up with a crowded, even toxic Twitter feed. In the twelve years I’ve spent on Twitter, I’ve ended up following an unwieldy crowd of over 3,700 accounts. I can’t make a big dent just by manually unfollowing people in my feed, so I use ManageFlitter, a powerful tool to sort and act on my followers.
If I just crawled through Twitter’s list of everyone I follow, weeding out followers one by one, I’d spend hours before I even got down to 3,600. This is partly because of formatting; Twitter lists my most recent follows first, but they’re the ones I’m most likely to keep. I want to dig through my early follows, and the accounts that talk the most, and the big accounts that I can always find again, and the accounts that don’t follow me.
ManageFlitter lets me do all of this.
ManageFlitter is actually a multi-feature Twitter management tool for businesses. But you can use its powerful Unfollow function for free. Just give it access to your Twitter account — don’t worry, it won’t tweet as you — and you can look at the accounts you follow, sorted by things like when they last posted, whether they follow you, how much they post per day, or whether they seem like a spam account.
You can also sort within these categories. For instance, under the “Not Following Back” tab, I can sort everyone by how many times they tweet per day. Or under the “Inactive” tab, which lists accounts that haven’t tweeted in a month, I can sort by whom I followed first. This helps you isolate a whole chunk of accounts to unfollow at once.
ManageFlitter sticks a big “Unfollow” button next to every account it lists. Unless you pay $US12 ($16) a month, you can only unfollow up to 50 accounts a day this way. Or you can just click an account name and unfollow on the actual Twitter site — you can do that as much as you like, for free.
Of the many Twitter plug-ins I’ve tried over the years, ManageFlitter impresses me the most. It’s fast, it’s thorough, and it’s user-friendly but free of bullshit. If you’re spot-checking every unfollow, you’ll still sink some time into this. But it will still be much quicker than sorting through your follows on Twitter itself.
ManageFlitter [Home page]
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