Twitter House Cleaning – Purging my Follower List and InBox

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I decided my Twitter account had gotten out of control and had heard about others doing some house cleaning of their twitter accounts. I decided to look into it. Here is my problem. I setup an auto follow tool some time ago, and can’t remember where I had done it. My follower list was over 3k people and my twitter timeline was useless. Here is what I did.

Cancel AutoFollow – Since I couldn’t remember which service was doing my auto-follow for me, and this is what created the bulk of my problem, I decided to just change my password. Once I did this, I had to go back to the tools I was using like hootsuite and tweetdeck and give them my new password.

Purge my Twitter Follow List – I used a free service called UnFollowAll to purge out my follower list. I had to run the tool several times to get it all done. But you can’t beat the price. I have heard others paying $25 for this service.

Purge my Twitter In Box – The other problem with AutoFollow is your inbox can quickly get filled up, I used a free bookmarklet called DM Whacker to clean out my inbox and sent mailboxes. With over 800 messages this would have taken me a while to do by hand.

Now I have a fresh twitter account and can begin to follow the people whose tweets I really want to see. I still see all the messages that include @adamviener in the messages, so if you think I really should be following you, hit me up that way!

See you on Twitter!

Adam

Comments

7 responses to “Twitter House Cleaning – Purging my Follower List and InBox”

December 7, 2009

Chad

Aren’t you worried that twitter might ban your account? They seem to hold higher weight on massive un-following than following. Was this the same tool that Johnchow and shoemoney used by any chance?

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December 7, 2009

Adam

I hadn’t even considered if Twitter would ban me for not following people and I wasn’t aware of Johnchow’s or Shoemoney’s experience. What happened with them?
Adam

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December 7, 2009

Chad

Nothing happened to either of them and they did big purges on their twitter accounts that’s why I was wondering if you used the same tool. I do know people who have been banned for doing massive un-follows though.
I’ve been wanting to clean out my main account with the 30,000 followers and its way to hard to follow the folks I want to anymore.
looks like you are OK at the moment, I’ll wait a bit and see how your accounts goes before I make the leap…:)

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December 7, 2009

Adam

I appear to be ok. I used Unfollowall.com, I don’t know what the other’s used. I did hear that JoelComm used a service for $25. Unfollowall.com was free, but took me several runs to delete 3k, so it might take a bit longer for you. It might be with the $25.

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February 2, 2010

Zapette

I 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

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April 21, 2010

KellyJ

I opened an account with Twitter but never followed it. I think I will return and explore.

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January 19, 2012

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