Unfollowspy

(Not quite a review, but everything you need to know)

To be clear, I don't have a problem with follower tracker apps like unfollowspy.

I would never begrudge a fellow social media app the results they have worked so hard to achieve.

(it's also probably bad karma)

But I do want to highlight some problems with follower trackers.

Argh! Daily stats tweets...

OK I get it... I'm a geek, stats are cool.

Knowing who your unfollowers are can be useful.

But I can assure you that your followers don't want to see daily tweets showing how many followers you've gained and lost.

Please turn these tweets off if you are tracking these stats.

If you don't, you will lose even more followers.

If you want to know who your new followers are then you can view that on twiends too.

It looks like recent followers and recent unfollowers are checked once a day.

Do you really want to know about unfollowers?

Some people WILL unfollow you.

It is as certain as the sun rises.

Even that old school buddy that followed you the other day will unfollow you one day.

The reason is that twitter follows are volatile, and they drop for many reasons.

Follower stickiness is affected by affinity:

• If you have a really tight connection to a follower (eg. a real world friend), then the follow may last for years.
• If the person followed you because they were super interested in what you were tweeting last week, then the follow may last a very long time (until their interests change).
• If you receive the follow through broad promotion, such with twiends or twitter ads, then it may last a medium to long time. You're doing billboard advertising after all, so some will drop quickly and others will stay for a very long time.
• And if you purchased followers from buy-super-fake-bot-follower-r.us, well you'll be lucky if they last a few days.

The point is that Twitter does not have as much permanence as Facebook.

Connections are one-way and not reciprocal, and so the network effect is much weaker.

So, if you are doing any form of active promotion you will see a ton of new followers, and a certain proportion of drops as well.

The bigger your account grows, the bigger your daily attrition becomes.

(some celebrity accounts see thousands of drops each day).

Follow-back is wasted

You can follow back new followers using Unfollowspy.

But you will get little benefit on twiends.

We don't track follows made outside of twiends, so people will not know that you are an active user.

If you are going to be connecting with others then it's far better just to do it on twiends.

Unfollower sources are hidden

No app can tell you where a follower has come from (it's source), unless the follow was made through that app.

It's not reported by the Twitter API, so there's no way to know.

You can only guess where followers are coming from based on where you are most active at the time.

Of course, we know when a follower comes from twiends because the connection is made via our website by the follower.

But we couldn't tell you where your other followers have come from.

Furthermore, because unfollows may happen at a much later date, you can't even guess where they came from originally.

Did they follow you yesterday, or a year ago? This is a big one, and it affects a lot of our new users.

We see so many people sign up who have been promoting heavily before joining twiends.

When these earlier followers start dropping it's hard to distinguish them from the new campaign just starting.

Unfollowing inactive users

With unfollowspy you can unfollow twitter accounts that don't have a profile image or haven't tweeted for a long time.

Please be careful

Unfollowing a lot of twitter accounts can get you suspended by twitter.

Especially if you do it often.

Also, some active twitter accounts just don't tweet.

They read.

Summary

I'm not sure if the app is still be developed by it's owners.

It looks like some of the features and pages don't work anymore.

But it does still provide some tracking for your twitter followers.

So, use if needed, but with caution.