There are some great tools out there for cleaning your Twitter list and managing followers/followees. I recently came across ManageFlitter which allows you to look more closely at the behaviour of those you follow, sorting them into 'talkative','quiet', 'Inactive', 'no profile image' and 'not following back.'
There's a Pro version which gives you extra features for more filtering and drilling down, and makes it easy to follow those that you retweet or who have @ replied you and you don't know them, that kind of thing.
TwitCleaner does a similar job, and although the 'mass unfollow' facility is no longer possible it's still a great tool for discovering just what those people you follow are up to. And then it got me thinking – I wonder if the people on these lists realise they are being cateogorised in this way? If they did – might they consider improving their Twitter behaviour?
There are 'check your Twitter reputation' tools that go some way to educating people on how to improve their 'score'. But as far as I know, none that alerts you to the fact that you're likely to be on TwitCleaner's 'Potential Dodgy Behaviour' list, or some other blacklist.
TwitCleaner's classes of tweeters worth unfollowing include 'No activity in over a month', 'Never interact with anyone', 'Hardly follow anyone', 'Bots', 'Tweets nothing but links', 'Posts the same tweet too many times'… if you were on any of these lists wouldn't you want to know?
I recently ran a TwitCleaner report on my account @1stfridaylewes and over a third of those I was following came up as 'potential garbage.' Looking down the list, the majority of these accounts are operated by small businesses or individuals who I am sure mean well but don't realise they're building up a negative reputation.
You can also check your own account with TwitCleaner, which is really worth doing, although TwitCleaner is only one tool of many. I'm not sure it's possible with ManageFlitter, for example.
I'd be interested to know of any service that aggregates results from different tools, as I'm sure the algorithms vary. It would be useful to know how you're being classified, and be alerted to any negative lists that you might be on. The reputation tools I'm aware of are all geared towards measuring 'influence' and don't tend to score you on negative behaviour. After all, a 'celebrity' might score well because they have a lot of followers, but by TwitCleaner's reckoning if they only follow back fewer than 10% they would be classified as 'potential garbage'!
I’ve used TwitCleaner a few times and found it useful for identifying accounts that have been inactive for several months. But I found the “Potential Garbage” rating to be really off base. There is nothing wrong with a person who has thousands of followers only following a small percentage back. Since when did reciprocal following become an indicator of good behavior on Twitter?
Why does TwitCleaner need access to my account at all, when the people I follow is public information?
Thanks for commenting – yes, it all depends on your personal viewpoint, I think. There’s a difference between indiscriminate reciprocal linking (which I don’t subscribe to) and showing an interest in what other people have to say on Twitter. For me, not following anyone back (or only a very few) indicates that the person views Twitter as a broadcast channel and has no intention of listening to anyone else, being helpful, contributing or forming relationships. That for me is not an indication of ‘good behaviour’ so yes, they would be ‘garbage.’ For others that’s clearly not the case! TwitCleaner has its own criteria, and other tools have theirs – I don’t think any one of them is without flaws.
Thanks Joanna. A question for TwitCleaner I think?
The phrasing “potential garbage” is for two reasons – one, to emphasise that what we’re doing is identifying behaviour types. Ie, it’s up to you to decide if it’s actual garbage or not. Two, to avoid the word ‘spam’. Initially most of what was caught by the report was spam, but as the categories have expanded that’s no longer true.
Robin has actually summed it up very nicely. The intent with the report as it stands is to identify accounts that are using Twitter as a broadcast medium, not interacting, not connecting with other Twitter users.
There is an interesting & growing use case though – people who use Twitter as a defacto RSS feed. For them, categories like “only posts links” are similarly useless. So, I’m planning on having two versions – one for people like Robin & myself that are there to connect with people. And a “news based” version for those who don’t care if they’re following accounts that will never talk to them (or follow back).
You are correct, of course. Not following back doesn’t necessarily mean bad behaviour. It is, however, a very strong indicator that someone doesn’t have much interest in you
Hi Joanna
That’s a really good question actually. There’s a lot of subtle stuff that goes on under the covers of Twit Cleaner that requires your authentication details to achieve. For example, if you had a protected account, we can’t see what you’ve tweeted recently without it.
Why do we need that? Because we look at who’s been talking to you, and who you’ve been talking to, and remove those people from your report. If you’ve been interacting with those accounts recently, there’s no way you’re going to go want to unfollow them, right? Ergo, they’re never shown. We do similar things with people that you have put into lists, & a few other things.
So, while on the surface the report is (intentionally) simple, underneath there is a ton of work being done. On larger accounts, a report can take quite literally hours to generate, and a lot of what is being done is stuff that Twitter won’t give us access to without your authentication details.
That said, we don’t go ANYWHERE near your DMs. That’s private information, and even though we could (algorithmically) scan that data to improve the quality of the report, I’ve made a very conscious choice not to. In fact, I haven’t even written any code to access DMs, so it’s impossible right from the get go.
Oh, one last thing, we also use the Twitter auth details to prove that people are who they say they are – in other words, to stop anyone else from looking at your report (since they can’t auth in as you).
Once you’ve looked at your report, of course you’re very welcome to revoke access. It’s generally recommended as a way to increase your security on Twitter anyway.