Editor’s note: This article was first published in February 2011. Twitter has since become X, and the follower-checking services it describes, Friendorfollow.com and Qwitter, may no longer exist or work as described.
In a previous article we talked about the Twitter effect, which is a huge craving for popularity measured by our number of followers, and above all for gaining followers at any cost. Thanks to Twitter, several websites have been created to make it easier for users to quickly “discover” those people you follow who don’t follow you back.
Let me say first of all that this is the very nature of Twitter. You may be a fan of a particular subject (football), and at some point you want to change your car, so you start following a car dealership. But the person who runs that dealership doesn’t follow you back, because he doesn’t like football and your tweets are only about football.
Following someone who doesn’t follow you back means nothing, and nobody is being disrespected. If anything, I’d say the disrespectful one is the person who follows someone only in the hope of being followed back and getting one more follower. So try to follow people who write about subjects that interest you, without expecting them to follow you.
With that said, to get an idea of the people you follow who for some reason don’t follow you back, you can use this website: Friendorfollow.com, where you just enter your Twitter username and the users who don’t follow you will appear.
There’s also useqwitter.com, which sends you a notification so you know instantly who stopped following you.
Don’t bother with services that send people a message saying something like “I’m following you and you don’t follow me back“. Not only is it frowned upon, it also looks far too tacky.
I’m the first to like people reading and sharing the articles I post on Twitter, but as far as possible I’d like that to be the follower’s own choice.
Further reading
- Twitter mentions on your mobile phone
- How to upload and watch videos on Twitter
- Facebook could hold back Twitter’s growth
Featured image: Wgreaves, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
