To-do for the Weekend: Manage Twitter Friends and Followers

Getting into the groove of following the same people day after day can mean that you keep getting information that you don’t actually even want, but have just conditioned yourself into receiving it. It may take a fresh perspective to realize that the account that bombards you with irrelevant stuff is just that, irrelevant.

FlockOfBirds is a tool for the iPhone for managing your Twitter friends, and now also your followers. It is at heart an analytics tool: it gives you information about the relevance, similarity of interests to you and network popularity of the accounts you follow (or “friends”, in Twitter’s terms). The app gives you lists that you can sort according to these criteria and more, and allows you to follow and unfollow accounts quickly and easily.

The app is free, so the best way to get an idea of how it works is downloading it on the App Store, but here are use case examples. 

Upon sorting the accounts you follow according to relevance, and switching the sort order to “ascending”, you realize there are accounts that indeed score very low on the relevance to your network, but who tweet all the time. One swipe and tap, and they are unfollowed. As easy as that.

Or, let’s say you sort the accounts you follow based on network popularity. You take a look at one of the top accounts and see the people they follow. You can now sort them according to the similarity of their interests, and you find on the top two accounts that you are not yet following, but who score very high. You decide to follow them, too.

FlockOfBirds has just released version 2.3 adding follower analytics and management. It also gives you notifications on new followers you get. Install it now and get insights into your Twitter networks to manage them more intelligently.