Twitter Gone Wild: How Many Are Too Many Followers?

As a copywriter, marketer, or person involved in the marketing department of a company, one of your jobs is to listen to what your client (or client's client) is saying.

Twitter, whether it's your personal Twitter account or your company account, is one of the best tools to use to search for what people are talking about. Why? Because it’s happening right now. Not three weeks ago or three years ago.

Lately, however, many people have had an overwhelming desire to delete all their Twitter followers and just start from scratch.

The amount of DMs (that’s Twitter-speak for Direct Messages, aka, Twitter email) with offers for white teeth, free porn, and claims of “I am a pro at XYZ industry,” as ballooned at an alarming rate.

Many people initially joined Twitter to connect with friends and find out things they didn't know by reading their tweets. Just like it says in this Twitter video: Twitter in Plain English.

After a while, people started awakening to the professional benefits Twitter had to offer and started following a bunch of people and organizations. Those people and organizations followed back, and so the follower counts grew from there.

The problem is when you have too many people you follow, the lack of quality tweets in your timeline can become frustrating – especially if one of your jobs is to listen to topics that relate to what your clients need.

You know it’s time to buckle down and dump people you follow when your ability to focus on what your clients want could suffer. For some this might mean keeping your following under the 3000 mark. For others, it might mean just several hundred. You can judge for yourself where your comfort zone lies.

Of course, one of the easiest ways to utilize Twitter as copywriter or a marketer is to go to http://search.twitter.com/. You can enter any keywords related to your particular need. Chances are you will find at least several results that will lead you in the right direction.

You can also utilize apps like TwitterKarma.com to help manage your followers. It will show you how many followers you are following that aren’t following you, who is following you that you aren’t following, and a few other useful things.

The only drag is that you have to manually click on each person to either follow or unfollow, so it could take as much as an hour to vet out all the people you don’t want. Or you could hire someone to do this task for you.

A couple of other great apps for this task are FriendOrFollow.com, and TwitterAnalyzer.com.

Hopefully you will find a happy medium where you can easily manage and listen to all your followers (and following).

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We are currently working on increasing our follower count on Twitter. If you enjoy reading our blog, you can help us out by following us right now. Wink. Wink. Hint. Hint. Nudge. Nudge.