How to UnFollow Everyone on Twitter
- 33 Comments
- By Zac Johnson on October 19th, 2009
A while back I signed up to TweetLater, which is now socialoomph.com. One of the features of having an account is “autofollowing” everyone that follows you, and another is “auto DMing”. This seemed like a decent feature at the time, and I’ve been meaning to go in a deactivate it, but I didn’t get around to it until now. My DMs were always full and I never even bothered to look at them since it was all auto crap. SocialOomph also has a page on how to can opt out of receiving automated welcome DMs from people you start to follow. If you want to build up your web site twitter account, autofollow might be a good idea… how ever it isn’t if you are actually going to use your Twitter acount to respond and monitor what others are saying.
I only had around 5,000 accounts I was following, but a good amount of them were bots, and users that just didn’t have any relevant tweets or content. So I just decided to unfollow everyone and start from scratch.
To unfollow everyone, it was pretty simple and actually took only around an hour. This will vary depending on how many accounts you are following. I used a combination of two sites scripts running at the same time. TwitterFollower.com has a mass unfollow option, and CloudAppears will just unfollow everyone. I filled out both forms and just let them run til I was back at zero. (I also just came across UnFollow All as a solution too)
Now I will manually go through and add everyone again that I am interested in following. Twitter is all about interacting and keeping in touch with those around you. As a blog reader., feel free to leave your twitter account url in the comments section and I’ll be sure to follow you back.
- Posted in Twitter
"With great power comes great responsibility".... my Uncle Ben told me that. Haha, just kidding! I'm Zac Johnson and I've been making money online for over 10 years now. In short, I started making money online while I was in high school... but my passion for marketing and making money goes back way earlier than that. I created ZacJohnson.com to help motivate you to start making money online, and live the life the you always dreamed of.
Nice post. I auto-follow everyone initially on my accounts to get the numbers up, but I definitely find that responding to Twitter is difficult if you’re following a large number. Did you use loose a lot of followers after unfollowing all?
hanji
ReplyI would like to know the impact on those following you. Did you get a lot of @ replies saying ‘wtf?’ or was it well received?
ReplyLike Commentor #1, I’d like to see if you lost many followers by stopping follwoing everyone.
PS: Follow me
Reply@ChefPatrick or Twitter.com/ChefPatrick
ReplyFollow me Zac, @MyBoxingFans
Reply@hanji – money-code:
Reply@jameszol:
I had around 5200 followers last night when I started, and am now at 4421.
Unfollowing tools are key these days. I remember when I hit the 2000 cap because my ratio wasn’t so great. Thank goodness for mass unfollow!
@pnstlion
ReplyVery helpful! Thanks!
ReplyThis is great to know. I started using twitter and followed everyone and anyone to boost my follower count. But it became unbearable and I couldnt keep track of what anyon was doing. Slowly, I unfollowed a lot of them, but this mass deletion seems like the best option.
ReplyFollow me Zac.
Reply@angadsodhi or http://twitter.com/AngadSodhi
Zac, I understand your frustrations. I have around 800+ followers and some times I feel like talking to a group of zombies.
A majority of my followers are robots or marketers who only care about their products and promotions.
AutoFollow used to work in the early days. Not any longer.
@TechThinker
ReplyI could not agree more. I have had the same thought process regarding bots. I follow things/people that I legitimately interested in on my personal Twitter and I do the same for my business with relevant topics. I don’t understand how following a bunch of bots can really help anybody.
ReplyA few of us have made this point right from the start and it’s interesting to see that more and more are finally catching up. It seems every other day there is a mass unfollow post! Thousands of people blindly following thousands of other people was always going to be pointless. No one is getting any value from the messages that flash past, if you are lucky you might login and see something that you are interested in – but it is highly unlikely.
But that said, with the new Twitter list functionality you can just create a list of people you actually want to follow and keep your main follow count in the 1000s?
Personally I want to know that the people I follow are of interest to me and the people following me are actually reading my tweets. By the way, TwitterKarma is good for this kind of thing.
ReplyI would like it if you followed me. I don’t post junk.
@phpgator
ReplyMy only concern or question would be… would it be ethical to unfollow a mass amount of people?
Thanks,
Jean
ReplyThanks for links but dont u think this is against twitter TOS??????
ReplyIf twitter is beneficial than these are also the dark side of this awesome social tool. Unfortunately spammers attack these kind of platforms first.
Nice to see such command in our hand.
ReplyI couldn’t keep track of what anyone was doing. Slowly, I followed a lot of them, but this mass deletion seems like the best option.
Replyfollow me?
@chewak
ReplyAfter the initial honeymoon period with twitter it has now reached the stage where more and more people are taking action to replace quantity with quality. Managing insame amounts of unknowns really hasn’t made sense for me from the word go.
Replyyeah . i used this before , it’s great feature to ” banned” people from spamming your twitter account…lol
ReplyI had no idea we could mass unfollow people! I may do just that. Seems like the only DMs I get these days are people saying, “I sent you a gift. Send me one back.” WHAT? I get enough of that silliness on Facebook. Now Twitter?? To me, that’s the kiss of death on Twitter…it gets them unfollowed and sometimes blocked. I don’t have time for that. Great post, Zac!
ReplyExcellent additions to the toolchest. I wish I’d had some of these a few months ago. Manually unfollowing dormant accounts a handful at a time is painful. Feel free to follow @perfectlyshaped.
ReplyFollow me: http://Twitter.com/jeffcampbell
ReplyI started off with Twitter the same way and I was following everyone who followed me. Finally I just lost interest in the account. I think I need to do this same exercise. Thanks for the resources. I’ll follow you again once I’m down to zero. BTW I’m cashlash on twitter
Reply@hanji – money-code:
There are always people who will remove you as well but I unfollowed 5,500 + people and my follower count only went down by about 220.
Also, there is a much better tool: http://unfollowall.twitterbotscript.com/
ReplyDoes not require you to enter your login details (secure) and you do not have to wait for the page to load to delete users it will run within 10 mins and delete your followers.
I agree with you Zac, do follow me at
twitter.com/dinonodotcom
Thanks!
ReplyJohn Chow has also been blogging on this topic. The days of being a twitter-slut seems to be over now, thank goodness! The new lists feature of twitter will also help to categorise the remainder of the flock
ReplyThanks! I did not this tips! Im gonna use it!
ReplyI agree with you , do follow me at
twitter.com/siteexpert
Thanks!
ReplyWell, I don’t think it can be done as simple as that. Thank you for the tips. I just can’t wait any longer to try this out.
ReplyAlright there is someone that goes under the twiiter name The_Illuminati that follows anyone that mentions illuminati in a tweet. They always say “we are now monitoring your activity” Now I believe they are real but still..
ReplyThanks ! I did not this tips !
Reply