There are three stages in the life of a Twitter user - Active, Resting, and Missing in Action (MIA). People often join, tweet a bit, and then fall by the wayside. If you are trying to build an active community, you may want to unfollow people who are MIA. ManageFlitter is a good tool for this.
If you are finding that your community isn't engaging with you, it may be because they aren't interested in what you are saying. I know that it hard to imagine, but if you have followed people who are simply looking for the follow back, getting them to participate is virtually impossible. ManageFlitter can help with this, too. It allows you to search your following database for keywords. Let's say that your business primarily serves sports enthusiasts. Searching for "sports", "football", "basketball", "hoops", "baseball", and so on will help you see if you are following the people you serve.
Cost: Free
Pluses:
- Lists the people in the order they were followed from most recent to oldest.
- Includes bio so you can learn more about the people you are following
- Shows people who are not following back
- Has a pop-up for each person with information on the average daily tweets, size of followers and following, when the Twitter account was created, and how many times people have unfollowed using ManageFlitter
- Offers a select on inactive (no tweets within the last thirty days)
- Also has selects on talkative, quiet, and no profile image
Minuses:
- Only shows the last 5,000 people you have followed due to Twitter's API limits
- Slow to load
- Times out (If you multi-task while you're waiting for the last action to complete, it may time out and you'll have to reload.)
Bottom line: A relatively efficient tool for managing the people you choose to follow.
Related posts:
- Wading in the Social Media Kiddy Pool: Diving into Twitter, One Toe at a Time
- Friday Favorites: Do Not Track, Twitter Promotion (or not), & Nordstorm's Twitter Activity
- Does Social Media Encourage Anti-social Behavior?