Twitter, it seems is trying everything to stop the abuse of this system!!

A few days back, I was using one of my software that used the Twitter API to manage my followers and following lists. I was monitoring the activities of almost 70 of my followers and found that they were not too active and hence I decided to unfollow them.

I selected these followers and hit the “unfollow” button. I got an error saying that there was an error and that the tool could not bulk unfollow the followers. I was surprised at this.

In order to verify this I straight away headed over to my Buzzom Premium account which has quite a few handy features for serious Twitter Marketers. I have had this account since some time now and have found their features extremely handy in my Twitter Marketing. When I went ahead to select the above said followers to unfollow them, Buzzom came up with the same message saying that I cannot bulk unfollow followers and that I have to do it individually.

How feasible is it to unfollow about 200 odd followers who have been inactive for quite some time?

It is not feasible enough, right? Then how did Twitter decide that they would stop this feature all together.

I often find that there are a lot of followers following me who all of a sudden take to Tweeting Spams and unnecessary messages which I do not agree to. If I wish to unfollow them now, I will have to do that individually. Why should I do that?

I understand Twitter’s point of view in checking spam and ensuring that the network is clean. I also understand the fact that they treat bulk follow and unfollow as signs of Spamming, but how advisable is it to take the control of the users in at least deciding who should follow them?

Of the many things that I hate about Twitter, there is this one more thing that has been added to my list.

I feel that this act of Twitter is a breach of my privacy!

What is your opinion on this?

What is the relevance of “Unfollowing“, when Twitter is all about “Following“?

Is that your question? It was mine too, till about some time back, when one day I realized, I am unable to accept any new followers. You are still confused as to what am I saying?

We will come to that point in some time. In one of my posts earlier, I had mentioned about blocking people who would spam me. There was an even better option of disallowing people to spam me. It was by “unfollowing” them.

So, you are wondering as to what is the difference between “Un-following” and “Blocking”. Right?

Let me explain it to you -

Blocking – This action restricts a person from sending you any more tweets but he still features in your followers list.

Un-following – This action removes the person from your followers list, thereby restricting his tweets from being visible to you and from clogging your dashboard.

You might be wondering the need to un-follow people. Why couldn’t they just be left there? When there is an option to block people, what is the need to un-follow?

Why would you want to unfollow somebody?

Twitter has a unique strategy to keep spammers and bulk followers from crashing their systems. Twitter has imposed a limit on certain aspects of using Twitter. Just check out the following -

• 1,000 updates per day
• 1,000 direct messages per day
• 100 API requests per hour
• Follow limit

The last point up there means that they set a follow limit to your account. This limit is set to 2000. So when your account has 2000 followers less than the number of people you are following, your account will freeze and you will not be able to add any more followers.

In a way this is a very useful tool. Why would you want to follow somebody who is not following your updates? Even if the other person is a celebrity, you would only want to follow him/her if they ar adding value to your tweets. Else, what is the reason? This is where “Un-following” comes in handy.

How do you un-follow people in bulk if, the number of such people are huge? This, indeed could be a difficult proposition. But Twitter is a technology that has can help resolve any problem.

The following are a few tools that can help you do this -

TwitIn -This is by far the best tool. It ha a very user-friendly interface and good features. You can bulk follow (they call it “Reciprocate’) or, un-follow people (which they can ‘Flush’). Extremely fast servers and a cool feature to increase your follower count as well.

FlashTweet – This is also a very useful tool. It has the same features as TwitIn except that here you just cannot increase your follower count by adding random tweeters. You can choose a friend’s name and all his followers will be added to your following kist (a maximum of 100 users). But its is extremely useful.

Twitter Karma – This is by far the best tool and it is free. You can bulk follow people and also un-follow them. It shows a list of people who are “only following” you and whom you are “only following”. The only problem with it is that their servers are quite slow. One can understand that with the kind of user following that Twitter has.

Huitter – This is again a similar tool but the only constraint is that it will un-follow or, follow without prompting you. This means that Huitter does not give you the option to choose which non followers to unfollow. Once you enter your twitter username and password, all those that are not following you are unfollowed. Hence, if there are any discrepancies in this app then you might end up unfollowing those who follow you.

Use any of the above tools as per you choice and comfortability.