I just read about and tested Tweetblocker. It’s a service which accesses your Twitter account, “grades” all your followers from A-F, and lets you block anyone who just doesn’t make the grade.
I began looking for this kind of service as a way to reduce the amount of Twitter spam cluttering my tweetstream. It was getting annoying to have to wade through multiple entries of junk directed at me from people who were just abusing the system. I was noticing that I was starting to feel slightly annoyed at having to wade through masses of dumbness in order to find relevancy.
(Keep this in mind for your own experience and that of your client community as well- we’re all looking for ways to screen and sort faster and easier so we can tap into what’s meaningful for us, and discard the rest.)
Tweetblocker took a while to load my followers, but did so reliably. I was able to then sort by A, B, C, D, F level followers. I blocked (and therefore simultaneously unfollowed) about 117 D & F level followers.
Luckily, the majority of people I am connected with on Twitter scored very high in terms of quality. I’m not sure how it works, but I suspect it has some kind of calculation based on length of time on Twitter, friend/follower ratio, number of tweets, and, perhaps, how many times the person retweets and is retweeted. Perhaps there is also some filtering based on how many times links are included in the tweet as well.
I expect my Twitter experience to be much better for the near future, and I’ll be using Tweetblocker regularly. I truly do believe that we’ll each need to proactively manage the amount of information we’re experiencing each day in order to remain effective and productive.
Tweetblocker is one service to help you accomplish this. I’ll be adding it to my social media arsenal, and using it every few weeks to do my part and combat twitter spam.
The service is free, and you can sign up at http://www.tweetblocker.com
Consider it like a spamblocker for your Twitter account.
I used tweetblocker for the first time a few days ago as well. Took a really long time to load my followers. I blocked all the Fs and most of the Ds. My only gripe is that it takes so long to do this. I wanted to at least scan the list before blocking since there were some legit new users on the list. I suppose after the first filter it will get faster.
I also blocked people with no picture and who had not been active for 2 months or more. No point in having them on the list. Just gives a false sense of how much reach one’s followers have.
Denise,
I completely agree with you- the downside to Tweetblocker, so far, is that it does take a long time to load followers. I think it should get faster after the first filter.
Your comment raises two good points: 1) everyone needs to have a picture of themselves in their profile in order to be seen as more legitimate and 2) if you aren’t regularly active on Twitter, your account is considered abandoned.
Thanks for taking the time to comment!
Rachna