Do you think you are truly aware of who is following you and who is not? All these mutual relationships? Are you even sure who is worth following and who is not?

Here we will talk about the importance of the management of  the followers and the ones that are being followed over Twitter. We will also mention a few tools that simplify the mentioned task.

Let us see start step by step.

Why Is This Actually Important?

The, so called, 2-Way Street

Generally, a social media can be seen as a 2-way street. If you are listening to somebody, you expect that he is listening to you as well. Unless there is a person that you are so interested in that you don’t care about mutual connection, you generally shouldn’t follow people that don’t show mutual connection. Chris Brogan also said something interesting: not everything is related to engagement – there are people that are really worth listening to, even when there is no ’2-way street’ present.

The Ratio Between The Healthy Followers To The People That You Follow

First impressions are as important in the social web as it is in the real world. A person who follows more people than she/he has followers, gives away the impression that she/he might be using mass-following strategies. Nobody is really interested in such users and one should always keep this ratio as close to 1:1, as possible.

One Should Always Get Rid Of The Deadbeats

It is a hard enough task to keep things up as they already are, why should one carry on relationships with people that are not even present. With Twitter specifically, many people signup, never to come back after a month. One should keep it as clean as one can. The noise should be reduced as much as possible.

Why Is A 3rd Party Application Necessary?

Basically, the lack of visibility would be the answer. How else can one tell who is who when one can not see the big picture. Several 3rd-party applications provide this visibility making it pretty simple to identify the important relationships, the influencers, users that are active and also the deadbeats – people who are not really interested in who you are.

Tweepi Application

Tweepi is a free application that comes from Thoughtpick. It is basically a management tool that provides the visibility that we mentioned, in four different sections:

• Flush – Used for displaying all users that you are following but who are not following you back, so you can unfollow them.
• Reciprocate – Gives a list of all the 2-way connection, or in other words, it shows you all the mutual relationships.
• Cleanup – Gives you an analysis of the people that you are following, pointing out the relationship status. Is it a 2-way relationship or are you following them without expecting them to follow you back?

So you probably ask yourself what is so special about this? Tweepi basically filters and sorts data by various different types of criteria. For example, one can see who actually has more influence and reach. One can also find out how many times is a person retweeted by others, who has a higher followers to following ratio, who is more conversational by looking at the number of replies and so on. One can even find out the frequency by examining the number of tweets in the last 7 days.

ReFollow Application

The other tool that we will mention is ReFollow that comes from Originate Labs. A similar but more visual approach. However, it doesn’t provide as much detail per user. Also, there are a couple of additional filters that can be used. One of them is very useful and unique – the display of the number of people that have mentioned you.
The search is another very useful tool that is added to this application. You can search for terms within the name, bio, or some of the last tweets that a particular user made. A very effective way to find relevant people

People can also be sorted by Friend Count, Follow Count and Tweet Count.

Some Final Words…

Find relevant people to follow, focus on true relationships and clear the noise from your stream. The tools are there, give them a try or add your favorite one on the comments section.

One should always try to find relevant people to follow, focus on real and true relationships and clear all the noise from your stream. There are great tools that can be used, and one should give them a try. If you know other applications as well, add your favorite in the comments section.

We wish you luck with your Twitter network…

	Saurabh Dutta
	Saurabh Dutta is the founder and author of TechChai. He writes on useful technology tips, tricks, tutorials, articles and interesting technology updates on various websites and blogs online.
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