Below is a guest post contributed by Patricia Garza
Monitoring twitter followers can be tough. With the amount of importance and emphasis of online marketing through social media, it’s time to actually start getting smart about it. While I do believe it’s better to have tweeted and lost followers than to have never tweeted at all, I also believe it’s time to stop viewing our social media with such a romantic disposition.
Cold hard fact: Your Twitter followers do not care about your feelings. That is, unless you feelings are a crucial hinge of your tweets (say, if you’re a professional artist or poet). Even then, they care only if your feelings are somehow hindering or enhancing your work and your tweets.
I’m saying all of this to throw you out of the mindset that you are using Twitter to make friends. You are using Twitter to network, gain readers, and keep readers. So whenever someone stops following you on Twitter, there’s no need to get bummed out. However, you should have every incentive to sweat a little. Or at least enough to get you to research and evaluate your usage of social media. Fortunately, there are many tools at your disposal to do this.
Here are the tools you can use to monitor your twitter followers
TwUnfollow or Quitter
Both of these applications offer similar services with slight deviations. Qwitter sends you daily summaries through email of who stopped following you on Twitter. TwUnfollow (love the name) offers practically the same service but also allows you to receive instant email notifications of who unfollows you. For a low monthly fee, Qwitter also allows you to track multiple Twitter accounts through one Qwitter account and will also show you your last tweet before being unfollowed.
This flexible web application offers many services (some free and some paid) for a variety of social media sites, such as Twitter and Facebook. I absolutely love how I can schedule tweets, track keywords, extend profiles, and view @mentions and retweets for free. While you have to look for it, you can also find a feature which allows you to “Follow those who follow you,” and “Unfollow those who unfollow you.”
Trying to find which tweets lose you the most followers? TweetEffect is an excellent application that highlights which tweets went south and lost followers. Just entering your Twitter name into the site will show your last 200 tweets, revealing which tweets lost and gained followers.
For those of you who love looking through and analyzing stats, you will absolutely love TwitterCounter. For those of you who hate stats and analyzing data, you should use this anyway. Though it won’t help you identify unfollowers, it gives you a great picture of the broader scope of your social media presence. For a small price, TwitterCounter allows you to see data for your retweets and @mentions.
Author Bio:
This guest post is contributed by Patricia Garza, who writes about gadget, technology, design, social media, e-learning related articles at online university rankings.
Photo: by RegisLearning
Thanks for this great post, Aaron. How do you monitor – not your followers but – what your followers tweet? So I’ve got one list and I want to search keywords just in this list. Do you have some tools in mind?
Best wishes,
Roland
Well put together Patricia! I love the flow of the article and it is very useful to newcomers to social media management. Looking forward to checking out the future content you publish, and thank you Aaron Lee for bringing her to us.
I loved the cold hard fact 😀 “Cold hard fact: Your Twitter followers do not care about your feelings. That is, unless you feelings are a crucial hinge of your tweets”
This is great…Thanks!
yeaa.. thumbs up.. thanks for the tips..
Can you teach me how to make a lot of followers on my twitter account?
My twitter account is running very slow to getting followes.
Thanks before guys. ^_^
This is so true: “Your Twitter followers do not care about your feelings”
With twitter we need to build relationships with our followers before we can ask them to do things for us. Twitter is a unique social media channel and must not be handed over to “the intern”. Get someone to spend time on it, it’s the only way to improve your presence.