As part of our social media management, we carry out housekeeping on our clients’ social media accounts. For Twitter you are perceived to be an account worth following if you have more followers than you are following. In order to have a healthy ratio of followers to those you follow, we often clean out inactive followers (those who haven’t tweeted for 30 days or more). Up until now ManageFlitter was our tool of choice.

But what went wrong?
In January 2019, Twitter contacted ManageFlitter and other tools that offered following/unfollowing features and said that “in application” management in third party social media management products would no longer be allowed.

ManageFlitter removed the follow/unfollow as Twitter said that this now needs to happen in Twitter directly.

You can read more in their announcement Changes to ManageFlitter – Removal of Follow/Unfollow Functionality. If you are affected by these changes you can voice your concerns to the following twitter accounts:

@Twitter

@Twittercomms

@Twitterapi

So what now are the options for keeping a good follow to follower ratio?
If you look at the various articles suggesting twitter unfollow apps, you will see that many suggest switching to Circleboom (Make Tech Easier and Social Media Explorer). Sadly the free package no longer allows you to unfollow 325 as suggested by Social Media Explorer. It is limited to 3 results. However eSocMedia do have a comprehensive guide to CircleBoom if you wish to upgrade to a paying package.

Other options include Unfollowerstats but there doesn’t appear to the option to unfollow inactive accounts on the free plan.

Or our new favourite, Untweeps. It’s simple to use and allows you to unfollow multiple accounts from an inactive list (you can select how many days you consider “inactive”) and once you are finished it will remove them for you. On the free plan, you can unfollow up to 2500 accounts, 3 times in a month. That is a whopping 7500 accounts per month! We have already tidied up our @reddeskvirtual account and will now be using this for our other Twitter clients.

If you are looking for ways to increase your follower to following ratio then Hootsuite has 44 ways to get more follows on Twitter.