3 Smart Free Tools That Will Help You Tidy Your Twitter Stream

Do you have a Twitter follower strategy? Are you a believer in reciprocity, faithfully following everyone who follows you? Or do you have set criteria about who you want to follow and stick to it?

Chances are, you don’t have time or inclination to spend time manually reviewing your followers and who you are following, but, with the help of some of the many tools out there, building in an occasional review can throw up some interesting insights about who is following you and where new and meaningful connections might be made. Many of these tools are free at entry level, with paid options for further services, so there is no barrier to trying them out and seeing which one works best for you.

If you want to get a better understanding of your Twitter community, streamline your following strategy to cut out the noise and focus on what’s important to you, here are 3 tools I have found useful. I would love to hear from you if there are others that are working well for you, please leave a comment below.

1. UnTweeps is a great utility that will help you to weed out dormant accounts that haven’t tweeted in a while, you can set the time period you want to search for dormancy from 30, 60 or 90 days. UnTweeps will also allow you to create a ‘whitelist’ of people you value that don’t tweet often, but that you still want to follow. You could argue if they aren’t talking they aren’t cluttering up your Twitter Stream anyway, but at least it gives you insight into your least active contacts.
2. FriendorFollow is visually appealing tool that graphically shows your Twitter community divided into three camps – who you are following, who follows you, and ‘friends’, or people who you both follow and follow you back. It easily allows you to follow or unfollow people as you wish, especially good for making sure you haven’t overlooked following back someone of interest who is following you.
3. Followerwonk gives a slightly different perspective on your Twitter community, in that it allows more mining of the data with regard to who your most influential Twitter contacts are, allowing various cuts of the data including recency of joining Twitter, how much each follower tweets, and how many followers they have. There is also a search facility that allows you to search users’ biographies on interest, location etc, and a feature that lets you compare users and their Twitter contacts. For a real depth of information in various areas, Followerwonk gives you lots of options to explore.

And while you are looking at your Twitter community and in a tidying frame of mind, don’t neglect your own profile, which you should keep updated and fresh with an up-to-date image and biography of yourself, using all the 160 characters this field offers.

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