Keeping it Clean at Twitter

We recently posted about about cleaning up your online presence and brand. Now that we’ve tackled that job, how about cleaning up your Twitter feed?

(And you thought I was going to write about using profanity on Twitter, silly you! Go ahead and swear like a sailor on there if you want. Knock yourself out.)

Seriously though, do you ever notice that you haven’t heard from some of the people you follow for weeks or months? Maybe you see someone in your timeline and wonder why the heck you’re following them. Or it could be that you don’t want to follow someone who isn’t following you.

So how do you to clean up your Twitter feed?

Get out the mops and pails
FriendorFollow.com – Just type in your user name (no password needed) to find out who you’re following that’s not following you back – or who’s following you that you’re not following back.

Finally, it lets you know when was the last time the person tweeted. You probably don’t want to be following someone who isn’t actively participating. Unfortunately, this is a laborious process – you have sort by last tweet, then cursor over each person’s icon to find the date of their last tweet, then click on it to go to their Twitter profile to unfollow.

Be warned that if you’ve been active on Twitter for awhile and have never cleaned up your account, going through it to delete unfollowers or inactive accounts could take hours.

It’s also an emotional process. I was a bit sad to see friends or clients who are no longer active on Twitter. Plus, I’m always surprised to see big brands like Weight Watchers or MyBLogLog not keeping their Twitter accounts up to date. If they don’t want to be in that online space anymore, they should delete the account The same for former employees of companies – why doesn’t someone take down their accounts after they’ve left? And those people who are no longer active but have thousands or tens of thousands of followers just blows my mind.

Twitoria.com is another service that does this. However, when I did a Twitter feed clean up with them, then went back to FriendorFollow, I found that I was still following lots of inactive people. I also keep getting messages that they’re down for maintenance.

How do you manage your Twitter followers and friends? What online tools do you use?

Anne-Marie Nichols is the Social Media Manager at Mom Central Consulting. You can also find her blogging up some healthy recipes at This Mama Cooks!

Anne-Marie Nichols