Twitcleaner – an impressive software tool

In my last blog here I talked about the anti-social (and ridiculous) nature of using an automated system like Truetwit to validate whether Twitter followers were human.   That may have given the impression that I’m totally against automation tools, but not a bit of it.

As with all such things, it’s not the tool, it’s the use you make of it. Just as some people have a digital SLR camera and never take it off the automatic settings, you’ll only get the best out of a tool if you use it with intelligence.

One tool I’ve been very impressed with recently is Twitcleaner, a far better way of weeding out those problem tweeps who clutter your timeline with nonsense than asking tem to take eye-tests.

When you are following a lot of people you end up hardly ever looking at your Twitter timeline, focusing only on @Mentions, lists, hashtags and Direct Messages – and that means that quality control inevitably suffers. Looking for a good way to prune my 13,000 plus followers so that I could concentrate on quality rather than quantity, I turned to Twitcleaner.

Sign on to Twitcleaner with your twitter username and it will run a report on the people you’re following, analysing their behaviour into refreshingly honest categories (I particularly liked “Trying to sell you crap” and “Self-obsessed”) so that you can spot which ones are dodgy, whether because they are Bots, boring or those idiots who post nothing but links. You can unfollow up to 500 people a day from the report, and (provided you use the old grey matter judiciously) your timeline will soon get much clearer again.

What’s more, it will also analyse your own tweeting style and suggest where improvements could be made.

Yes, it gets a definite 10 out of 10 from me.