How I cleaned up my Twitter friends with TweepSync
tl;dr? Just go to TweepSync then.
When I decided to bite the bullet and start using Twitter in earnest, I knew that I would be very late to the game. I avoided Twitter like the plague for years while nobodies and has-beens were building huge followings. So I did the what any sane, level-headed human being would do: I paid $99 for a scammy-looking program that promised I could gain thousands of followers each week with a simple set of steps and followed each one to the letter.
I won't get into all the details of how this unfolded… that's a long sad story I plan to keep to myself. One thing I will share, however, is that in order to build more followers on Twitter, I set my two accounts (@mappdev and @montoya_c) to auto-follow anyone who followed me. This is fine for my business account, and I still have that setting today, since I use it primarily as a marketing tool to announce new products / updates / etc. For my personal account, however, this turned out to be a mistake. Following over 1,000 people on Twitter, many of which you don't know / are equally agressive about building their list of followers / are fake accounts / spammers / etc. is an easy way to render Twitter totally useless. And as you probably already knew, it's very difficult to clean up a list of "friends." On Twitter, you would have to go to your list and unfollow each one individually, a process requiring about 2 clicks per person… I estimate that at 5 seconds per person, it would have taken me about 3 hours to unfollow all the people I need to remove. The sad thing is, I actually tried doing this, and got through about 60 accounts before I gave up.
Fortunately, I have a very cool tool called TweepSync that I built a while back to emulate the same functionality that some services charge money for, mainly, the ability to follow people who are following you, and to unfollow people who are not following you. Essentially, it allowed you to make the list of people you follow, and who follow you, to be identical… hence the name. With about 20 minutes of writing code, I was able to add a new feature: unfollow anyone, in bulk. This is a feature that Twitter has been forcing some services to stop providing, but the way my service works is more likely to be allowed in the future. When you use TweepSync, you are shown 20 accounts at a time, and have the option to check each one you want to unfollow, or check all 20 at once. So for about 1,800+ accounts that I needed to unfollow, I was able to get through the whole list in about 10 minutes, all the while avoiding a small handful of accounts that I wanted to continue following. And with some clever fixes to the backend, I was able to make my tool extremely quick and responsive, so it's a pleasure to use. Here is a screenshot of the interface:
If you haven't tried TweepSync yet, you really should. It isn't nearly as popular as most other Twitter tools out there, even though it provides a unique, and in many cases, extremely useful set of features, some of which others either used to provide, and no longer do, or provide for a fee. The latter really grinds my gears… how can you charge $15 for a simple API method? Even more, how can a tool that charges money for something I give away for free get more traffic? I think the answer to both questions is people just don't know about TweepSync. So I highly recommend that you share TweepSync with others… tell your friends / followers / favorite people about it and spread the word.
And here's one more thing… if you run a Twitter services company and think that you could provide TweepSync the marketing it needs to really take off, I'm interested in selling it. Contact me and we'll talk further.
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