How To Successfully Manage Your Twitter Followers

All right, I’ll admit it: when it comes to Twitter I am absolutely a selfish beast. Whew! I’m glad that I got that off of my chest.

Seriously, when it comes to social media, the usefulness of most sites is determined by reader experience, particularly what you can get out of it. Sure, there is a certain amount of sharing involved (discovering pages, stumbling, shouting, digging, etc.), but how many of us would spend our time doing all of things for no reason? Not me.

Two Twitter Accounts At The Moment

I’ve mentioned several times previously that I avoided Twitter for ages, signing up in 2007, but not making good use of this microblogging site for the next year and one half. Since January 2009 I’ve been twittering away and now have two accounts – mattkeegan and theautowriter – from which I operate. Side note – the first one is my general Twitter account while the second one represents my online face to the car industry.

But one of the downsides to Twitter is their follow system. I find it to be a bit of a pain in the neck to manage and, yes, I sometimes am annoyed when I exchange follows with someone who then proceeds to unfollow me. A closer look at the way that this type of Twitter user operates reveals that they do this with other users – just check their profile and you’ll find that they have hundreds if not thousands of more people following them then the number of people they follow.

Then again, it could be that someone just doesn’t like my tweets. I’m simply heartbroken.

Your Twitter Karma

Thanks to Dossy, who wrote the script behind Your Twitter Karma, finding out who follows you and who you follow is easy to do. No messing around with that awful page on Twitter trying to find that answer. You can’t.

With Your Twitter Karma you can enter your Twitter user name and password to find that answer. This tool looks at everyone who is following you (red arrow) and everyone you’re following (green arrow) to show your status with them. Then, if you do as I do, you can bulk unfollow people who have dropped you or bulk follow people you want to add. Of course, you can leave a box unchecked by the user’s name and no change will be made. Or, you can simply do nothing and move on.

Oh, and let me say this – I find it annoying when people constantly tweet messages commenting when people have decided to drop them. Please keep your big, fat ego off of Twitter or at least have the decency to no longer follow me!