I follow quite a few discussions on various groups on LinkedIn and an interesting discussion came up. Should you or how often should you purge the people who follow you on Twitter. The person who posed this question got quite a few different responses. Her contention was that if someone you follow doesn’t follow you back then you should stop following them. I think this is erroneous thinking and many of the experts who commented agreed. Should there be an equal ratio of followers to people you follow?
Twitter is all about disseminating information. If someone you follow provides you interesting articles that you get benefit from, I think it is perfectly okay to continue following them. However, I do agree that you should look at your list of who follows you and who you follow periodically. I typically review my list about once a month and get rid of anyone following me who is spamming. Then I also get rid of people I’m following if they haven’t tweeted something in a very long time. I assume they have either gone out of business or don’t have anything relevant to say.
Many people in the discussion thread recommended using ManageFlitter. It is a tool that has many functions that help you sort your followers/following lists by a range of criteria. It also helps you find new people to follow with their search capability. It can also track who unfollowed you on Twitter. They offer several different plans from Business to Pro to Freebie. Of course, each plan provides a different range of features.
Another tool that was mentioned is Tweepi to help manage Twitter follows. Someone else uses lists created on Twitter to help manage the follows. Others never purge. If the person posts great content, it doesn’t matter to them if that person follows them or not.
So, as you can see, the opinions are all over the map. I always advise my clients to do what is best for their particular company. I would definitely get rid of any obvious spammy accounts that are following you and focus on qualified followers. Insofar as who you follow, I agree with the other experts that you should follow someone if they offer relevant content.
