Crowdfire is a free web service that enables you to analyse your Twitter followers in various ways and is useful for managing them. See who your fans are, delete inactive people and more!
Let’s see what insights you can gain:
- See people you follow, but don’t follow back
- See who unfollowed you recently
- See who recently followed you
- See which followers have become inactive with no tweets
- See your best Twitter fans
There are five different Crowdfire plans and the cheapest, which is fine for occasional use, is free. For the following guide I will be using a free account. There are some limitations, but there are still some great features that you can use for free.
(This is part of a longer article about Twitter in the course Secrets to successful social media promotion. Go to the courses.)
1 Sign up and sign in
Go to the Crowdfire website and click the Get Started button if it is your first visit, or click Sign In in the top right corner if you have been before.
2 Authorise Twitter access
This service is for analysing your Twitter followers, so at some point you are going to need to authorise access to your account. Might as well do it now, so click Sign Up With Twitter or Sign In with Twitter if you are returning.
(Don’t worry, you’re not handing over complete control, it just needs to be able to see who you follow, tweets and so on. It gives minimal access.)
3 Check Twitter non-followers
Crowdfire is very easy to use and you just click the menus in the sidebar on the left. At the top is Non-Followers. These are people that you follow, but who don’t follow you back. That’s mean of them!
There are sometimes good reasons for this and you can follow Bill Gates, Apple, newspapers, TV companies, celebrities and so on, but they aren’t going to follow you back.
You may want to look for people that should follow you back, but don’t, such as people in similar a similar type of business, with a similar interest, tweeting about the same issues, and ask yourself why. Is it something to do with your tweets? Are they not finding them interesting?
Maybe they just don’t know about you. See what they have been tweeting recently, like tweets, reply to them and share them. They might start following you back.
4 Recent Twitter followers and unfollowers
There are menu options in the sidebar to show people that have recently followed you or unfollowed you. Twitter notifies you when people follow you of course, but if you missed the notification it can be useful to see recent followers here.
Select Recent Followers and there is a list of people with buttons next to them to enable you to follow them back. It is a tiny bit easier than doing this here than on Twitter.
The Recent Unfollowers is interesting (it might not show up on your first visit, because it needs to gather data over time). It is said that some people will follow you for a short time and then after you have followed them back, they unfollow you. It is a cruel trick to gain more followers.
You should be suspicious of accounts that have large numbers of followers, but who follow few people themselves. On the one hand there could be a good reason why they don’t follow many people, but on the other hand it may be deliberate and a trick to boost followers.
Should you continue to follow people that unfollow you? Don’t just follow people that follow back, look at their tweets and keep on following if they are interesting. If their tweets aren’t what you want to see then unfollow them.
5 Delete dead followers
Sometimes people stop using Twitter and there are any number of reasons why, but sometimes people just stop tweeting. Perhaps they just lost interest, changed their jobs, closed their business, website or app, and so on.
Crowdfire lets you see inactive Twitter followers. Just select Inactive Following in the sidebar and people that have not tweeted for a long time are listed.
A couple of menus on the right enable you to choose the timescale and the sort order. For example, you could list Twitter accounts that have not tweeted for six months or more sorted by the oldest first.
What should you do with these? Right click them and open them in a new tab to see their Twitter account. You might find people that have not posted a tweet this year. Some may not have tweeted for more than a year.
Why follow accounts that do not post any tweets? Use the buttons to unfollow anyone that has not tweeted for a long time, such as more than six months. The accounts are probably dead. Sometimes there is even a message stating that the account has closed, moved and so on. Sometimes they simply stop.
See the course: Secrets to successful social media promotion
Be the first to comment