Tool Test: Twitcleaner
Categories: How To Social Media tips, Social Media, Twitter
Rid your Twitter Stream of pesky spammers, bots and other pests
Who to follow is certainly one of the most difficult questions for any Twitter user. I don’t subscribe to the method to follow everybody – even if they followed me first. Every once in a while I use a service called Twitcleaner to clean up.
I am still looking to connect with real people on Twitter. I have met quite a few and every day there are more! But I also go and discover new people to follow every day. And sometimes I end up with disappointing results – some of the people I follow end up using Twitter as an automated tool to push their ads or blindly copying their Facebook updates to Twitter (one of my pet-peeves).
I also believe it is important to keep the follower / following ratio about even. You may have noticed that Twitter limits the amount of accounts you can follow at on time. If you want to follow more than 2000 accounts there are ratios to observe.
Following (account-based): Once an account is following 2,000 other users, additional follow attempts are limited by account-specific ratios. The Follow Limits and Best Practices Page has more information. ~Twitter Help Center
Even more reason to focus your following to accounts that bring value to your Twitter experience!
Now, you could go through your extensive list of accounts and unfollow some…. that would take a while. Fortunately @SiDawson developed a program that analyses pre-sorts the accounts you follow!
theTwitcleaner.com
You sign in with your Twitter account and let Twitcleaner do it’s job. Depending on how many accounts you follow this may take a few minutes. In the mean time it may be a good idea to check how you look for others!
Ha ha. @TwitCleaner told me I was frickin’ awesome! Check yourself here: twitcleaner.com
— Tweet4Ok (@Tweet4OK) April 5, 2012
Once the little Twitclean bird is finished it sends you a DM (Direct Message) and then you can review the results and make your choices:
No, I don’t kick everybody out that shows up with a negative rating! A lot of the tweeps are on my list because I see value in what they share, even if it’s mostly links or if they are what some call “chatty tweeps”. However, Twitcleaner is a great educational tool for me. It’s one of the tools that help me be a person and not a robot on Social Media.
What do you think? Have you tried Twitcleaner? Are you “guilty” of some of the “dodgy behavior” that Twitcleaner points out?
Over the last couple of years I have enjoyed Frithjof’s helpful hints about the effective use of Social Media tools and was constantly impressed with his ability to create effective and engaging communication content.
For this year’s re-election campaign I asked him to help with my digital media strategy and execution. With short notice he designed and implemented an effective strategy, integrating several social media platforms and creating a brand new website.
Frithjof successfully dealt with the particular branding rules of our party and Elections BC as well as creating content that was designed to appeal to a wide ranging audience. Frithjof and his team tirelessly created engaging content including text updates and video features and also did real time reporting of events.
Frithjof is very responsive and able to communicate in a variety of ways so I could always rely on the timely publication of important content during a busy campaign.
I am looking forward to continuing to work with Frithjof as a digital media strategy advisor on my communications team.
Thank you for writing about Twit Cleaner! Nice layout, very easy to read.
Probably worth noting, the areas we currently cover, in terms of who might appear on your report:
* Dodgy – spam phrases, @ spamming, duplicate links, duplicate tweets, app spam, advertising networks etc
* Absent – No updates in a month, fewer than 10 tweets, deleted & suspended accounts.
* Repetitive – High numbers of duplicate tweets or links
* Flooding – So high volume you can’t see anyone else
* Non-Responsive – No interaction, those that follow back < 10%, streams that are all feeds (facebook, twitterfeed etc)
* Little New Content – Retweeting lots or just posting quotes
* Not Very Interesting – People who talk about themselves a lot, or aren't followed back very much
You can also run a mini-report on yourself, that'll give you tips for improvement, or tell you how you might be limiting your influence on Twitter (aka, annoying people so they unfollow you)
And yep, you can't follow more than 2k until there are more than 2k following you. Once you're over 2k, you can't follow more than 10% more than are following you (so, not over 5500 if only 5000 are following you, etc).
Thanks again for writing about Twit Cleaner. I appreciate it.
Si Dawson
[Twit Cleaner Creator]