Twitter - How To Build and Happily Manage Your Followers

But then after I got used to Twitter, I had the need to tidy up my follow list. Eventually, I established that some of the people I had at first followed weren't really people that I was interested in continuing to follow. Here are some tools to help you look into your tweeps and make an informed conclusion about whether to keep following them.

Twitter Grader assigns every user you run through its system a grade from 1-100. Using this tool you can investigate how engaged the people you're following are and that can help you decide if you want to keep following them.

Twinfluence is a scientific approach to measuring the influence of Twitter users. It's another set of metrics you can use to help you figure out who you want to follow.

Tweetcloud - One of the most important factors when deciding whether you want to follow a Twitter user is what sort of content they tweet about. If someone tweets mostly about topics you don't care about, they might not be the best person for you to follow. Tweetcloud creates a tag cloud of a person's tweets to give you a bird's eye view of the type of things they tweet about.

There might be a crowd of tweople (people) who are following you that you aren't following back, and similarly there are in all probability some people you're following who aren't returning the compliment. That's not necessarily a bad thing - if their content is good on their twitter stream, then you shouldn't worry to much about whether they follow you back or not. But knowing who your friends are is helpful when you're attempting to organize your Twitter follows.

Twitter Karma is a great app that lets you sort through all of your follows and see who's not following you in return, who you have a mutual follow/follow-back relationship with, and who is following you that you're not following back.

Friend or Follow does essentially the same thing as Twitter Karma, helping you figure out who your friends, follows, and fans are on Twitter. The difference is in the presentation, and it might be a little easier to use for those with a large number of follows or followers.

Twitterless will notify you when somebody stops following you and tell you who it is and your follower history is graphed out over time. Find out why you're losing or gaining followers.

That may not be a particular bad thing - some people might be envolved on Twitter specifically to follow others and track their updates. But inactive users may also not consist of the best people for you to follow. Here are two tools that can help you sort out the inactives.

Nest.Unclutterer will automatically block Twitter users who are following more than a certain number of people or who have been inactive for a certain number of days. You can specify those thresholds and white list certain tweeps so that they are exempt from the cleaning. Nest.Unclutterer is actually less about who you're following, and more about making sure people following you are actually friends you want to be associated with.

Twitoria scans through your Twitter account and finds anyone who has been inactive for the past week, two weeks, month, two months, six months, or year.

Now that you've cleaned up your Twitter follow list, you'll want to keep on top of things from here on out. Here are two apps that will help you better manage new follows and followers.

TweetSum digests all your new followers, rates them using what they call the DBI ("Douche Bag Index"), a number that supposedly weeds out Twitter users likely to be annoying, and then lets you easily follow them back or categorize them as tweeps you don't want to follow. You can see a list of recent tweets for each new follower as well, which is helpful.

Tweepler is a new follower management application that lets you make quick, one click decisions about whether to follow people back or drop them into an ignore pile (out of sight, out of mind). In addition to being able to view recent tweets, Tweepler gives helpful stats about new followers, such as average tweets per day.