I've been dreading subjecting myself to the ritual of sorting through my lists of Twitter accounts which I follow, because although there are several tools out there intended to help the process along, it is still a big job, especially if your list has grown since last you reviewed it.  

However this time around the job has become much easier, and it is all thanks to Twitcleaner. It is a tool that's been around for a while but has been completely rejigged, in order to comply with Twitter's own restrictions on auto-unfollowing. The current interface is very easy to use, sign in using your twitter account and let it run a report. When it's done (even with over 6000 in my follow list, it didn't take too long) you will get a Direct Message from TwitCleaner to tell you the report is ready to view. To access it, you have to follow them and the tool is set up so that only you can access the report prepared. 

The report is very detailed and groups into several types of 'potential garbage' users, listing how many users are just trying to sell, how many post nothing but links, identical tweets, and those that are using advertising networks. It also gives you a list of dormant users and tells you how long it's been since the user last tweeted, all at a glance. Not only that, but you get to see who is just posting quotes or simply retweeting someone else's posts, and even those who are 'self-obsessed' (the report's words); i.e. referring to themselves in their posts all the time, are listed. 

It makes it much easier for you to see what should be unfollowed - for me, I found about 1000 dormant users who had not posted in over 100 days; the users are brought up in a list of thumbnails and to unfollow all you had to do was click each one. There is a limit to how many you can select per day, because of Twitter's rules the app allows 500 accounts to be selected every 24 hours. 

I cannot recommend this highly enough for those of you who use Twitter regularly, I was amazed at the sheer number of spam accounts I had collected; some had multiple accounts under similar names and posted for a month, then disappeared never to be seen again - yet they were still in my list. Twitcleaner made it easy to spot these accounts, when you see groups of 'people' who had not posted in exactly 320 days, for example, it soon becomes clear they're spam accounts. 

Of course it is necessary to review your Twitter followers periodically, since if you do follow a lot of accounts you need to keep the ratio of followers to followed accounts within 10 percent; i.e. if you are following 5000 users and only 4500 follow you, then you may be disallowed from following any more until you unfollow some accounts. When you collect spam followers as most people do, they're effectively stopping you from following users you DO want. Twitcleaner makes the whole process of clearing out your list far easier than it has ever been before, so I recommend all Twitter users make use of this tool.

Oh, did I mention it was free to use? (That said, you are invited to donate if you have the wherewithal!) 

Twitcleaner is available at:

http://thetwitcleaner.com