Wikipedia says:
Twitter is a social networking and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read messages known as tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters displayed on the author's profile page and delivered to the author's subscribers who are known as followers. ...
You can use twitter in many ways during your job search, post that you need a job, follow a company or their employees, even search for job openings.
Tons of people sign up for twitter, follow some people, tweet a few times then never log back in again. These inactive users artificially inflate your followers count. In building your network, you will naturally acquire some of these type of followers. But do they add any value?
No. I say delete them. A real network is a group of people that you talk to, not just a bunch of faceless names in a list.
So, how do you get rid of the dead weight in my network?
The best way to remove twitter followers is to block, then unblock them. Block/unblock removes you from their follow list and they will have to seek you out to follow again. Do not simply unfollow them, because they may have setup a service to run a reciprocate check and refollow you.
Every few months I block/unblock all my twitter followers with the any of the following criteria:
- never tweeted
- have not tweeted in over a year
- only tweet the same thing over and over
- clearly are just spammers (this is subjective)
Here are some tools that you can use to find inactive twitter users.
- tweepi.com - follow unfollow reciprocate
- twitblock.org - finds followers that have spammy behavior
- untweeps.com - find inactive twitter accounts
- twitoria.com - finds inactive users.
- twerpscan.com easy to sort way to find inactive twitter followers.
Twitter is a very useful tool. Just remember that is just a tool and not a job.
