There’s been a big buzz lately about this new service, The TwitCleaner, so last week, I decided to try it for myself. Basically, it is a service that looks at the people you are following, and grades them, and puts them into categories. It then makes suggestions as to who you should unfollow. Weeding the garden, so to speak, trimming the fat, to make you a lean, mean, Twittering machine.
Enough cliches.
When I got my report, the TwitCleaner had divided my less-that-stellar followers into three categories:
Dodgy Behavior, No Activity in Over a Month, and These Accounts Ignore You. Dodgy Behaviour was further broken down into Nothing but Links, Tweeting the Same Links all the Time and Tweeting Identical Tweets all the Time.
Let’s be clear, here: TwitCleaner is a robot. It can’t judge your twitter followers in the same way you do. I have specific reasons for following people. Some, for example, that the TwitCleaner deemed sub-par, are friends of mine, who, for whatever reason, have joined Twitter, and then abandoned it, or gone off to Bali (Hi, Carla!). I will continue to follow them in the hopes that they pick it back up again. There are people that I follow that I know will never in a million years follow me back (Google, a few celebrities), and I’m totally fine with that. Some people that I follow do twitter nothing but links, but because they are a news source, I’m not going to unfollow them. In fact, that’s why I’m following them.
What is interesting to me about the TwitCleaner is the rules they use to deem someone a lousy twitterer. Twittering all links, all the time. Twittering the same link all the time. Twittering the same tweet all the time. These are all characteristics of pushy and annoying sales tactics. They may work in other worlds, but on Twitter, most people that I know who are hard-core Twitterers, will not put up with those kinds of tactics. You will get unfollowed very quickly.
TwitCleaner is free–try it out. Now, if they could come up with some way of judging your followers based on a set of criteria that you set yourself, then it would be beyond brilliant. @TwitCleaner, are you listening?