If you’re following over 2,000 people on Twitter and tried adding 2,000 plus 1, you might have been blocked by Twitter and received a popup message reading something along the lines of: “Could not follow user: You are unable to follow more people at this time.” Upon further inspection, an explanation on why you got this message from Twitter is that you might be following more people (also known as friends) than people are following you. While Twitter does not limit the number of people that can follow you, Twitter has an unpublished ratio of allowable Followers-to-Friends to prevent from overwhelming its system.
If you have more Twitter friends than followers, some of your so-called ‘friends’ are not be reciprocating the Twitter love, and it might be time to do a little spring cleaning of your Twitter friends. Here are five great Twitter resources that take edge off of the stone-cold heartlessness of un-following, i.e. de-friending, someone:
1. Friend or Follow. Instead of arduously inspecting your friends profile-by-profile, Friend or Follow lets you see in thumbnail view of your friends’ Twitter icons of who’s following you. Hovering your mouse over a thumbnail lets you see a quick bio. Friend or Follow also allows you to organize Twitter friends by name, username, follower stats, location, etc. Friend or Follow is a great resource to un-follow friends that are not following you back.
2. TwUnfollow. TwUnfollow is a service that you sign up with with your email that sends you an instant email notification when a friend un-follows you on Twitter. Without services like TwUnfollow, friends that un-follow you will go unnoticed like a needle in a haystack, but still have the benefit of having you as a follower- don’t let them. Similar to TwUnfollow is Qwitter that sends you a daily instead of an instant notification.
3. TwitterCounter. TwitterCounter doesn’t identify your un-followers but it shows you a line graph of your Twitter followers so you can see the bigger picture. You can also segment this line graph by week, month, or quarter-year. A fun feature about TwitterCounter is that it can analyze your past activity and give you a prediction of how many friends you’ll have (whether you’ll gain or lose) friends over time.
4. Goodbye, Buddy! Goodbye, Buddy! Is similar to TwUnfollw in that it gives you an instant notification when someone has un-followed you, but better that TwUnfollow in that it gives you a direct message on Twitter. Another great thing about Goodby, Buddy! is if you log on to their website, you can see a history of your un-followers.
5. TweetEffect. TweetEffect deals primarily with the content you’re tweeting that might be soliciting un-followers. When you type in your username in their website, TweetEffect will bring up your last 200 tweets including changes in you followers. Of course, you’ll want to avoid content that’s inspiring a substantive amount of un-followers.
Written By Jaszver Bauzon
