I love twitter. I probably spend more time on there then I do almost anything else. I’m not sure if it’s good to be admitting it, but I’m pretty much addicted to it. That being said, there’s something I hate about twitter, and it’s something that the development team over there really needs to figure out. Spammers. I’m not talking about the traditional type of spammers, those are actually pretty minimal considering the popularity of the service. I’m talking people who follow you today, then unfollow you tomorrow when you don’t follow them back.
In my opinion, these people are worse than people pushing v!agra in direct messages.
It was pretty difficult to determine who was genuinely following you because they like what you’re saying, and those people who have such low self-esteem that they somehow equate a high following count on twitter to being popular. I’ll never understand it. If it wasn’t for BirdBrain, I’d probably still be guessing which are genuine followers, and which are self-involved. If I’m coming off sounding a little harsh, I completely intend to be at this point. If there’s anything that’s going to kill Twitter as we know it, it’s going to be this.
Thankfully, there’s a tool that’s helped me keep tabs on the worst offenders out there. Birdbrain gives you analytics on your followers. It lets you know who followed you today, and who unfollowed you. It also lets you compare these statistics over the course of time so you can see your net gains in your followers. At first I wasn’t sure just how handy this application would be, since Twitter isn’t about the golden ratio to me. It’s completely about letting people get to know the real me, my thoughts, and my opinions. Sure there’s marketing potential here, but it’s not my number one focus. What I began to notice was Birdbrain is excellent at letting you know who the superficial Twitter users are in a way that doesn’t take much research.
All you have to do is open up the application, check who followed you today, and then wait until tomorrow, or a week later before you even begin to think about adding the person. It’s a little bit of work, but it’ll add to the quality of your audience on Twitter. It’s not unreasonable to get a handful of people adding you today, and removing you tomorrow. Sure, it might be that they don’t like what you’re saying, but, I’d gander that most of them are just trying to bump their stats in a cheap way.
If you want to get a handle on this I’d recommend checking out Birdbrain. It’s worth the money, and it’s worth the time it takes to implement into your workflow. You’ll clean up your Twitter account in no time.
