Twitter purged a bunch of fake accounts last week. It’s a bold move for a company that had created value based on it’s user count. But as most of us can attest, fake accounts are a real drag, and getting rid of them hasn’t hurt Twitter’s stock price in any discernible way. We want to showcase some free twitter unfollow tools to make your Twitter feed more relevant.
Fake accounts take valuable time, they troll, and they are probably there to only collect data. They suck to deal with and they literally slow everything down. A drag, in every possible sense. As an ad platform Twitter’s value is reaching people in real-time, fake accounts dilute that ability and make advertising less effective both in targeting and delivery. Long-term, this is the only move Twitter can make.
I took some time to audit the accounts we follow on Twitter for @SEOBandwagon and @keepkalm. A time consuming task to be certain. Over the years I was following nearly 2,000 accounts and nearly 5,ooo for our business account. A fair number of those disappeared after the purge, most noticeably for our company account, and it seems like a good time to get rid of a few more. Going through that many accounts by hand is not really possible so we are taking this opportunity to showcase a couple of free tools anyone can use to audit their Twitter Account.
Twitter has moved towards an algorithmic feed, so getting rid of some accounts on a regular basis should help you get more relevant information in your feed. There are a variety of ways to evaluate which accounts you should unfollow. Inactive is pretty obvious, lots of accounts move to new handles and leave the old ones behind to preserve the namespace. Too active is almost worse. You can just open up some accounts and just see how quickly new tweets come in. It’s a bit much and it’s almost always pitchy webinar sign-ups or ebooks. Most people just don’t tweet that much.
Free Twitter Unfollow Tools
ManageFlitter
ManageFlitter allows you to sort your followers list by a variety of metrics to show inactive accounts, which accounts tweet too much, and which ones are fake. ManageFlitter allows you to unfollow up to 25 on your free account.
There are ways to increase your usage amount, like the Tweet below. Please sign-up for ManageFlitter, it’s easily one of the best free tools and if you are going to stay on the free level you will likely need more than one of these services anyway.
We are evaluating ManageFlitter for an upcoming post for #TwitterPurge. Try it with this link and we both get 5 extra unfollows daily! #Unfollow https://t.co/QvE73rPQb5
— SEO Bandwagon (@SEOBandwagon) July 16, 2018
Circleboom
It’s like a quieter ManageFlitter when you show up, the same basic features are there: Follow, Unfollow, Tweet, and Analytics. My favorite feature is “accounts creating too much noise in your newsfeed,” more than 20 tweets a day is a lot. Even if that counts @ replies.
Found that I'm following 218 accounts appear to be creating too much noise! Use https://t.co/EpLWzJiDIz to find talkative accounts you follow who send more than 20 tweets per day. Clean up your news feed! via @circleboom
— SEO Bandwagon (@SEOBandwagon) July 18, 2018
You get 100 free unfollows before you have to pay. Circleboom has some automated features to help you grow your audience also. Their RSS to Tweet feature may be worth a future post on it’s own. There are also tools to follow Hastags like #SEOChat or #Mozcon to find and interact with Twitter users based on interests.
Crowdfire
Very slick interface, easy to unfollow people and the free version is somewhat limited and you will likely run out of Unfollows Fast.
Commun.it
Another Freemium product with more than just unfollow features. Just about any of their other features, for engagement or scheduling Tweets, append their branding to any engagement features. Follow and unfollow features can’t really encroach on your brand and it a useful, albeit limited feature.
My favorite Commun.it feature is how it breaks down account lists and gives you a nice hover card for accounts so you don’t have to leave the browser window. Although you really can’t do all that much with the free account, the paid service also adds features for Facebook and LinkedIn.
iUnfollow
This was just okay, I don’t know why anyone would need this if you had used any of the above tools on this list. It has a simple interface and it works. Doesn’t give any real guidance on who to Unfollow other than not following back, so it’s only slightly less useful than your account page that lists all the accounts you follow.
UnTweeps
We reached out to the site owner regarding SSL and didn’t hear anything. We took this risk for you, our readers, so that you don’t have to. Immediately disconnect your account from websites that may no longer be under development. Or worse, compromised. It works, but you probably don’t need to use it. I’m not even going to link to it because it is non-SSL, so use it at your own risk. This is a reminder to check your Twitter App Permissions instead.
@rlamfink can I ask you a question about @UnTweeps ? DM please?
— SEO Bandwagon (@SEOBandwagon) July 17, 2018
Unfollow All Twitter Accounts
Nuclear option, available as a Chrome Extension. Sometimes it is just easier to start over and follow a couple of selected accounts. We didn’t test this option, it may violate the TOS for Twitter Apps based on every other service we tried and it also sounds like a bad practice. If you tried a full purge with the Chrome Extension let us know how it goes in the comments.
Please check all privacy terms on your own. Most of these tools require Twitter permissions and Chrome Extensions can have huge privacy implications. We do not receive financial considerations for these products, but we are participating in affiliate or referral programs for some of the services reviewed here.
