How I Cleaned My Twitter Account

I was posting the other day about my Twitter blockade situation complaining that I cannot follow back bloggers from WordPress because I had hit the 2,000 followers limit and an ‘aggressive’ unfollowing from my part might have suspended the account.

So obviously I asked over here for support and thank here the community of bloggers and followers. What next? In the beginning I was just being very active with tweets and RTs thus raising my Klout influence score which is average but improving and eventually asking some of the proclaimed Twitter gurus what should I do: they said wait just as Twitter said and it will deblock… Not very helpful though, not very guru as I expected – I am the third bird in the picture below.

Credit: http://www.agent-x.com.au

But posting my problem over here on WordPress did help a lot, since fellow blogger Laurel Anderson, dropped by and I hereby thank her for engaging with it advising me to use the ManageFlitter tool to clean my Twitter account.

I started on Twitter some years ago being interested primarily in filtering news originating from journalists’ accounts thus getting the daily headlines. I was working in the media at the time and just loved the idea of having my main news packed in 140 characters (can’t get more concise than that!) but did not exactly engage which is one of the main reasons why people follow or unfollow an account over there. Of course it also happened to follow either spam accounts or inactive accounts and had no idea there was a ratio limit. Consequently my account was in bad need of a good washing.

In case you find yourself in the same situation, you may sign in on ManageFlitter website with your Twitter account and choose to filter and unfollow these: fake accounts, quiet or inactive users, unfollowers and so on. I was following a fake account of Vladimir Putin so clearly I needed to find the real one! I also had to unfollow Amy Winehouse as she was inactive… You can even filter and unfollow those very talkative accounts that flood your stream with endless auto-tweets per minute.

Of course, there are other similar Twitter cleaner tools such as Tweepi or The Twit Cleaner but the latter closed down recently (so they say), hence the ManageFlitter option seemed like a one stop shop cleaner. The whole thing might get more complicated if you’re targeting followers with a certain Klout score for marketing purposes but my issue was down simple, I had to clean it for spammers and inactive culprits.

Any unfollow action performed here reflects immediately on your Twitter account but you have a limit of 100 unfollow actions per day using their tool. In case you do follow their handle @ManageFlitter (disclaimer: it’s not an advertorial although it looks like), they increase the limit to 300 unfollows a day – and follow you back – which is what I did since I needed more. That’s the free option to filter your Twitter account unless you need something complex.

Luckily my Twitter account is still on and cleaner and I resumed to act wisely from now on.

Thanks again Laurel, also Alastair and everyone else! And I did follow back as promised!