There comes a time in every Tweeters life where they need to trim the fat from their follower base. When that time comes, there is no better tool to use other than Friend or Follow, a fabulous means to trim that fat from your Follower base and more.
I found out about Friend or Follow from none other than Social Media Examiner in one of their posts. I furthered explored Friend and Follow and here is what I found.
Friend or Follow, created by Dusty Reagan, Indie-Developer and author of, “Twitter App Development For Dummies” launched Friend or Follow in late Spring of 2011. The four primary questions Friend or Follow answers is:
- Who unfollowed me on Twitter?
- Who’s not following me on Twitter?
- Who am I not following back?
- Who are my friends? Find out!
To get started, visit, www.friendorfollow.com. From there simply enter your Twitter username in the big honkin’ area in the middle of the page where it says, “enter Twitter username. Next you’ll see a screen that lists all of the users you are following that are not following you. This where you can begin trimming that Twitter fat I just talked about.
Now if you are using the free version of Friend or Follow you’ll individually have to hover over each user and simply select “Unfollow.” Sometimes the page gets a little fidgety, so you might have to actually click on the user icon one by one and unfollow the user from visiting their profile. In addition, to unfollowing users you no longer find worth following, this is also a good opportunity to revisit some of the profiles you might have forgotten about. I saw profiles I hadn’t seen for awhile in my feed that I was glad I remembered I followed by looking at my Following section.
The next feature to check out is Fans. Here you are able to see all of the users following you who you have not followed yet. This may consist of a lot of spam accounts but also other users you might have overlooked from a while ago. This is your chance to show some Twitter love and follow them back. Same action to unfollow on the Following page applies here.
The final feature to check out is the Friends feature. This shows mutual followings between you and your fellow Followers. Doesn’t it feel good when both parties do their part by mutually engaging with you?
If you foresee yourself using Friend or Follow as a major tool to manage your Twitter account, I suggest upgrading to Gold Membership. The first seven days are free and you can cancel at any time. Thereafter, Gold Membership is $9.99/month. There are some pretty awesome features by becoming a Gold Member, such as:
- Select multiple users to either unfollow or follow
- View the various sections of Twitter users in a list view. This provides more user-friendliness and efficiency.
- Export your Follower data into a to CSV spreadsheet, which is great for reporting purposes.
From visiting Friend or Follow, I was able to clean up my following list by 17 users. This improved my Following to Follower ratio which should always have some balance as have a high Following to Follower ratio indicates your profile isn’t that engaging to others. You want to make people to want to follow you. Hard to get never goes out of style with Twitter.
Before Friend or Follow
After Friend or Follow
So there you have it, a great tool to help you manage your Follower/Following component of your Twitter account. Hope this proves to most helpful to those Tweeters out there. Leave a comment to share your experience with Friend or Follow. Let your ROAR be heard!
