You need to prune in order to grow your social followers
By Chris Abraham. Filed in Social Media Marketing |Tags: Google, justunfollow, lady gaga, manageflitter, PayPal, Social network, twitter, untweeps
Photo credit: Wikipedia
Clients, colleagues, and my friends all want to increase their follower count. In a world where Lady Gaga has 25,555,017 souls following her @ladygaga Twitter profile, we’re all in it for the numbers. Not everyone wants lots and lots, some want the right followers. To them, that usually means being discerning when it comes to following someone back. What I do is absolutely follow everyone back who follows me at @chrisabraham. There’s a fourth option that not many people actually do routinely: pruning the dead leaves and branches away from the little bonsai or your might oak you call your Twitter profile.
I started with UnTweeps, a tool that allowed me to unfollow any and all followers who have not tweeted in X-number of days. I started with 30-days and worked up from there. There’s a free version as well as a very inexpensive subscription or single-pay model you can conveniently pay for using PayPal (three-day non-recurring subscription, $1.37, one-month non-recurring subscription, $6.49, Monthly recurring subscription, only $5.00, and one-year non-recurring subscription, $35.00)
Then, I explored ManageFlitter, another tool that allows one to strategically follow, unfollow and white-list folks depending on their not following you back, not having a profile image (just a default egg), having a non-English-speaking profile, being inactive for more than 30-days, being overly-talkative, overly-quiet, or having a “bad ratio,” which is to say, following way more people than follow-back. I really like it for its versatility. It offers most of its functions for free but I recommend contributing some to their project and there are quite a few added functions if you become a pro member — $12/month for one user and $24/month for 2-5 users. What’s really cool with MF is that they offer a thing they call “Google+ To Twitter” which allows all G+ posts to cross-post to Twitter — with a host of amazing settings.
Finally, I fell for JustUnfollow, which is much more than just unfollowing. It’s quick and easy, simple to use, and makes it easy to handily dismiss all the folks who are not following me back or are inactive. I am a pro on there as well, and I am very happy with the ease-of-use and quickness of the app. Pro is $9.99/year for a single user but I have a 5-user account for $24.99/year.
I ended up pruning around 38,000 followers. Yes, the result of that means that a lot of people are unfollowing me, too. I have gone from having almost 48,000 followers on Twitter to 45,000. But, I really needed to groom, tweetscape, and prune because in the race towards more followers I ended up getting lots and lots of weeds, vines and underbrush, basically strangling out both the air, space, and sun that can help, in the end, make and keep my Twitter profile in good health.
Tuesday, June 12th 2012 at 5:51 pm |
Okay, but… You have 45 something followers and follow 9k and something people. So, obviously you don’t automatically follow back. Surely, if everyone followed your advice, your follower list would be the same size as your followed list? How does that work?
Tuesday, June 12th 2012 at 7:23 pm |
I surely did follow everyone who followed me! Not at first but surely in order to build my followership. Reducing my 38k was the direct result of that. But there were a lot of really junk profiles I was connected to and so I prune, I prune, I prune.
Tuesday, June 12th 2012 at 9:53 pm |
If I understand you correctly, you’re saying that at one stage you did follow all 45k of those followers, but you pruned them back on the principles above. That seems extraordinary. Accepting that, though, why wouldn’t it be easier just not to follow them in the first place? If they don’t tweet, or they’re bots or whatever, why follow in the first place? Or was it because you were using automated following back? I’m not trying to be argumentative, really, I’m just interested in how this works.
Thursday, June 14th 2012 at 11:04 am |
Of course I was using “auto follow back” because nobody in the universe has enough time — especially someone running a company — to follow-back by hand. So, yes. But using the tool, I did unfollow some folks I didn’t want to unfollow — so in the future I will be more careful. I may well have hurt some feelings.
Wednesday, June 13th 2012 at 1:46 pm |
But when the pruned ones are bots, they will automatically unfollow you after some time. Certainly those who use software for twitter.
Thursday, June 14th 2012 at 11:02 am |
Yes, and I say be gone with them.
Thursday, June 14th 2012 at 11:29 am |
Yes indeed. Its better to have 1000 real followers and readers, then 40000 automated followers
Friday, June 15th 2012 at 4:58 pm |
I don’t agree with your response. Sadly, it’s a hybrid. One needs to develop the mass and influence associated with lots of followers as well as finding the right followers. For example, having a church with 40,000 parishioners is more impressive than having a church of 1,000 followers even if the church with the thousand is more pious. When it comes to general power and influence, 40,000 “bad Catholics” can be more formidable than 1,000 of the righteous when it comes down to it. I need to be 1,000 real followers AND 39,000 others — that’s the best.
Wednesday, June 13th 2012 at 2:24 pm |
ok bottom line then your choice for twitter management is JustUnfollow– a bargain at $10..
Thursday, June 14th 2012 at 11:02 am |
Yes, I like that one the most, I think.