You Are Offending People On Twitter, But Who?
Are you offending people on Twitter without even knowing it? The truth is every time you post a new tweet to Twitter you are potentially encouraging someone to stop following you.
By default, Twitter doesn’t tell you when someone kicks you to the curb. So there’s no way to know if something you said made people drop you from their radar.
Fortunately Qwitter provides a simple solution that fills the gap to help you keep track of when people unfollow you. Qwitter even tells you what you said just prior to the person unfollowing you.
This can be extremely valuable information if you are tweeting business related information and you need to know what topics people are wanting to hear about. If several people unfollow you after you post a series of updates on SLR digial cameras, then you might assume that they weren’t interested in that topic.
Personally I unfollowed several people during the finally days of the 2008 Presidential race because of their negative attitudes. If they used Qwitter, then they would have known that I unfollowed them after they made negative tweets.
Now to be fair, knowing when someone unfollows you is not always as helpful as it might sound. Sometimes it’s just not clear why they left and you might find it is more of a novelty than a matter of business intelligence.
But if you’re interested in having more visibility into what’s going on with your Twitter followers and you’d like to watch for follower trends, then Qwitter is a great solution.
Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com
Hey, great post, but I want to know how to unfollow people who’ve offended ME! lol Really, I’m a bit of a Twitter novice. It’s hard to figure out all the little tricks to it without wasting a lot of time.
Eunice, the quickest way is to click their profile image on your Twitter page, which will take you to their Twitter page. Just under their picture and Twitter name you should see an “Unfollow” button. Click that and you should be good. I use Tweet Deck and I can unfollow people directly from within the application. Occasionally I will spend a block of time clearing out banned accounts or spam followers just so my true followers won’t come across garbage in my profile. I can’t tell you if there is any real value in doing that, but it makes me feel more connected to the people who follow me on Twitter.
Nice post – thanks for helping me find this tool. Just signed up and now am waiting my first “unfollow”.
Chad, don’t take the unfollows personally. You will soon see that most of the time there is no real pattern. But as with most information it is good to be aware of what is going on. Do you have any tools you like to use?
I like this app and I'm using it, but it'd be great if you spelled "novelty" correctly. Just a thought.
Is anyone else having issues with the Qwitter service? I signed up a couple of weeks ago, know that I have had some “unfollows”, yet haven’t received anything from Qwitter.
Any similar issues or ideas about resolving?
Thanks!
Drew
http://www.DrewHull.us
http://www.twitter.com/drewh408
http://www.linkedin.com/in/drewhull
Hey Drew,
If you’re looking for a way to monitor your Twitter health, you might take a broader approach and use a combination of Twittercounter, Bit.ly, and Twitalyzer to keep tabs on how people react to your tweets. Twittercounter will graph your Twitter follower count over time and gives a good picture of your follower progress. Bit.ly will track clicks on your twitter links that you include in your tweets. Twitalyzer will analyze your Twitter activity to gauge how well you are socializing. Bit.ly is my favorite tool because it gives the most concrete results. I combine Bit.ly with SocialOomph to automate and manage Twitter activity. If Qwitter is giving you fits, you might try using one or all of these instead.
@Drew Hull:
I was wondering the same thing. I have the same problem – unfollows with no notification from Quitter. Has anyone used this service successfully?