Twitter Bulk Unfollow Tools
Dec 19th
I’ve been so busy at work lately that I don’t have time to tweet or manually select those whom I want to follow and unfollow. I set an auto-follow via a twitter tool that I talked about previously, Socialoomph.com. One good thing about using this tool is that it automates the task of following those who follows me. For me, its a courtesy gesture to follow those who follow me. However, there are also those who are following others by the bulk to ‘jack up’ their follower list and those who are plain spammers. So, it gets quite a bit of work when I try to weed out those who really tweets and those who are just blasting endless useless advertisements.
This morning, I searched for tools to do bulk unfollow because I have close to 1,000 followers and going through all these one by one is going to be a very time consuming task. Here are the few that I found :-
Twitter Karma
URL : http://dossy.org/twitter/karma/
This tool shows you the whole long list of those whom you are following & whom are following you. You will instantly know whom you are following that are not following you and vice versa. You can tick boxes beside the names to do a bulk follow or bulk unfollow. Oh yes, you need to key in your twitter ID and your password to get this done. Its simple, fast & easy.
Friend or Follow
URL : http://friendorfollow.com
You only need to key in your twitter ID and they will show you a list of (1) FOLLOWING – Those whom you are following but is not following you (2) FANS – Those whom are following you but you are not following them (3) FRIENDS – Those whom are following you and you are also following them . From this list, you can then click on the respective icons that brings you back to their twitter profiles and you can make a decision to follow / unfollow. Ok, so you can’t do a bulk unfollow or follow but you have instant information on your fingertips to make a decision.
Untweeps
URL : http://www.untweeps.com/
With this tool, you can see whom has not been actively updating their tweets. This tool allows you to specify the total days of inactivity ~ so your report is customized according to your own criteria. They call it ’stale tweeps’. With the whole long list, it is by default checked so you can just click on bulk unfollow if you want to. I had a long list, and I was thinking to myself.. if they are not updating their twitter for 30 days, I believe they have permanently abandoned it? If you have a long list of people you are following, you’d be surprised how big this pool of inactive tweeps can be!
Buzzom
URL : http://www.buzzom.com/
Once I key in my twitter ID, it gives me an option to Flush, Grow or Reciprocate. The idea behind it is quite similar to the rest – follow those who follow you stuff. An interesting add on is that it has a Twitter Statistics to measure your influence, retweet efficiency, retweet rank.. etc.
I used Twitter Karma and Friend or Follow to keep my list ‘clean’.
On the other hand, I’m now using Qwitter [URL: http://useqwitter.com/ ] to be notified of whoever is unfollowing me. I just signed up for this service, whereby I only need to key in my twitter ID and email address to be notified of those who unfollow me. I can stop the service anytime by clicking on the link that has been emailed to me.
For now, I just want to keep my Twitter list clean. 
Dinner in the Jungle
Dec 6th
Yes ~ it really was a jungle. Those following me via Twitter would have noticed me saying that I was having dinner in the middle of a jungle. I tried to use geotagging but my Twitter client just couldn’t locate my location even when my Google Map & GPS was working fine. hmm…
In fact, when we first spotted the signboard, it reminded me of those eerie movies whereby you bump into a rundown motel beside some highway. The location is off the Hulu Langat highway, somewhere about 1km away from the famous Ampang Look Out Point. The best part of it all is that it has no proper signboard and just a dingy looking “Open” signage lighted dimly which was clearly visible in the darkness of the jungle.
As our car went past the “Open” signage through a gate, it was entire darkness and we felt not-so-right because there was no lights, and nothing was visible in front. The road is not tarred and bumpy all the way. Its a village road by passing some private lands (according to the signage) and you are charged RM2 upon arrival at the carpark. If not for the advertisement that said that there is a restaurant inside, you would have to literally kill me to drive into such place for dinner. To illustrate what I meant by how scary I felt, refer to the location map I plotted using Google Map below. Its really thick jungle and its something like one kilometer into the jungle before you can see some lights. *phew*
As we approached the restaurant, there was something like 40 cars parked in the darkness and the restaurant was full house! Unbelievable!! We ordered 6 dishes in total excluding the desserts. The food is good, I took a pic of four of the dishes and forgot about taking the remaining two when I got into eating. Its always like that ~ once I start to get into the mood of eating, I forget the pics. Hahaha… One thing to note, as soon as we ordered, the food arrived in 5 minutes which was timely since we were already starving.
I snapped some photos but it was really too cold to even have non-shaky hands. Because it was really really dark (it was close to 9:00PM when we arrived), so you can’t really see much from the pics. The restaurant is built around a fish pond and is really breezy and cooling.
Its a unique experience ~ having dinner in the middle of the jungle. This restaurant has a nice ambiance & “feel” but would be almost impossible to locate if you have no proper directions.
What’s The Strategy?
Dec 4th
“How can social media improve my business?”
“It depends…”
“You mean…?”
Its funny how people expect a quick one liner answer to a question like this. I wished there is a quick answer but unfortunately its not as simple as it sounds.
Social media is not just about blogs, Twitter, Facebook, internet, online banner advertisements. These are social media tools. To get into social media, the first thing you must have in mind is your goal and what strategy you want to use. The strategy must be unique to your business, and no blind copying because a strategy custom-tailored for another business (though might be in the same industry) might not have the same effect to yours.
There is an interesting article I came across, “Social Media Not The Answer for Weak Brands” which quotes that social media is akin to better weapons & bigger army strength in a war, but ultimately it is the warfare strategy that leads to a win. The emphasis is to get the strategy right, then use social media as a platform to execute the strategy.
Although I truly believe in the strength of social media, I’d not want business to think and believe that social media IS the ULTIMATE everything to help improve businesses. Social media is a tool and a platform that can help businesses reach out to target audience, engage with them, interact with them, understand them, maybe even as a channel to test responses for new product/service roll out. All these information leads to better understanding of the business, which can then be used to improve business processes, realign products/services offerings, offer new products/services and of course (hopefully), lead to a bigger bottomline.
Thinking about using social media for your business? My advise – start with the end in mind, that is what is your goal, then think about the strategy to deploy, then only which social media platform to use.
