Twitter Noise Reduction: The Twit Cleaner

 

Twitter Noise Reduction: Twit Cleaner

Twit Cleaner is a handy little web app which gives you a report on the behaviour of those you are following on Twitter — the app can also provide a report on you too. It has some potential for marketers using Twitter which I will get to in a moment.

Twit Cleaner breaks down tweets this way:

Dodgy – spam phrases, @ spamming, duplicate links etc
Absent – No updates in a month, or fewer than 10 tweets.
Repetitive – High numbers of duplicate tweets or links
Flooding – High volume of tweets flooding your channel
Non-Responsive – No interaction & those that follow back less than 10%
Little New Content – Retweeting lots or just posting quotes
NonResponsive – People who’ve posted less than 10 times, whose tweet streams are purely pumped out from an RSS feed, or have no followers
Absent – People with deleted or suspended accounts (depending on whether they’ve left “voluntarily” or not)

Based on the percentage of the behaviour flags above, Twit Cleaner rates the sources and provides you a report. You can then elect to unfollow those people flagged by Twit Cleaner — the process is manual due to Twitter rules.

My Twit Cleaner ReportWhen you request a scan from the web page, the application will request authorization (just like other apps do for Twitter). It follows you, makes you follow it (don’t worry, you can unfollow) and then sends you a DM with the link to the report. The report lists any suspect accounts and then you have the option to unfollow them manually. You can also view a report on your own twitter account to see if you are doing anything “dodgy” and that’s a feature which marketers can certainly use to be sure they are playing nice on Twitter.

Its creator initially set out to create a tool to clean up his Twitter clutter and reduce the noise level, but he soon realized he had a powerful marketing tool as well. Twit Cleaner can be handy for marketers who want to do a little Twitter list hygiene. Since it flags followers’ behaviour that might indicate they are not engaged followers, you can apply it to “tune” your list and remove inactive/unengaged accounts and those which might be bots.

This is not hard science. That is to say, the algorithms being used to flag the accounts are good at picking out certain behaviour which may indicate the accounts in question are not ones you want following you. However, it’s not the holy grail of Twitter list hygiene, at least not at this point.

Forrester predicted in a recent report that we’ll see more filtering on Twitter and getting people’s attention will be that much harder for marketers in the coming year and Twit Cleaner is likely to be just one of the first of many “noise reduction” tools we’ll see.

What do I suggest to those worried about such filters? Take a look at the parameters listed above and don’t do them. I’m not really being that glib here when I say that. I may not be a big fan of algorithms trying to ape human judgment, but most of the behaviour this app is tracking and flagging adds little positive value to Twitter.

Analyze how you are using Twitter and ask yourself if you are doing any of the above and then ask what value you add to the conversation. Do you even converse or do you simply Tweet away? Twitter is NOT just a megaphone. Twitter is a channel for conversation and interaction. Engage and interact with people as humans if you want to leverage it for your success!