As we start 2010 we all begin to make (or break) our annual attempt at new years resolutions. Following the bakers dozen worth of Mom’s Naniamo bars I devoured over the holidays its time to trim the fat. Offline I am starting Fitness February (earlier this year to accommodate the olympics I’m actually 2 weeks in):

The Rules of Fitness February

Rule # 1 DETOX – Live free of alcohol, smoking and other toxins.
Rule # 2 FITNESS – Weekly fitness goals increase in intensity.
Rule # 3 HEALTHY CHOICES – Eating less fatty foods adding more raw foods Consider Cleansing- another great option.
Rule # 4 CHEAT DAYS – In the past we allowed only 4 days of freedom where you will be allowed to indulge.

Pretty simple and easier when all the boys on your hockey team are doing the same. Less temptation for a pint after the skate.

However now a days a cleanse has to transcend our day to day to our digital life. More specifically its time to cleanse some of our social profiles.

Today I going to talk about some of the tools we use to maintain our Twitter accounts.

Trimming the Fat:

We are all being “spammed” on a daily basis and if you don’t stay on top of it your accounts can easily get out of control. I am talking about these disruptive “techniques” that usually contain tips on “teeth whiting”, “How To Make Money” or just want to chat like “I wanna talk with a cute guy”, “hey guys single chick”. This crap plagues all our accounts on a daily basis.

The two tools we use to maintain our accounts are Refollow and Twitsweeper. Both allow you to login using Twitter Oath. I wont use a tool unless it uses Oath for security purposes.

Although both these tools help with the cleansing my favorite tool for removing spam is Twitsweep. It allows you monitor and remove “spammey” followers based on a growing library of spam phrases. You have full control over who you remove and can chose from three levels of automation to do so. Fully automatic, automatic with delay,and manual confirmation. I used the manual setting initially to make sure I saw it was being marked for deletion and once I saw that it was targeting the spammers I have switched to the automatic with delay setting.
Refollow works a bit differently and is more of a hands on web based applications. “Refollow helps you discover, manage, and protect your Twitter social circle.” It allows a lot of flexibility with there very easy to use filtering system. There are 15+ pre-set filters that you can turn on and off with with a simple checkbox. A couple of the filters I use regularly are:

:“Tweeted in the last:(blank) days”, you can set the number of days by a drop-down.
:“Users who have mentioned me” combined with the “Im not following” filter checked”

It really comes down to what is your Twitter policy, Do you follow everyone that follows you? Do you only follow people who interact with you?, These questions will ultimately determine how you use this tool.

I hope these tools help you with your day-to-day Twitter management and helps you begin your cleanse. Are there any tool you use that you would recommend? I would love to here about them.

~ Adam Kambeitz

Warning: When using these tools please abide by Twitters Following Limits and Best Practices over “following” can result in account suspension.