How do I know when someone unfollows me on Twitter?
Do you want to know who has stopped following you on Twitter? Ever wonder which tweet made someone decide to unfollow you?
Well now you can find out! You can use Qwitter to “catch your Twitter quitters”. If you were not already neurotic this program will make you neurotic. You will receive an email saying @TwitterUser stopped following you after this tweet.
Ouch! I received about 20 unfollows yesterday after my FourSquare update saying I was hiking. Maybe I should take the hint that not all of my Twitter followers care about my FourSquare updates…
Thanks @CrystalPina for telling me about this program. (I think).
I used to use Qwitter, but gave it up after a while in favor of just running FriendOrFollow.com every so often.
One thing to know about Qwitter is that if you’re a high-volume tweeter (and by high-volume, I mean more than a couple tweets a day): the “unfollowed you after X tweet” is useless, because they don’t monitor things in real time.
As I understand it (and this is just my understanding), what Qwitter basically does is to pull your follower list every so often and compare it to the last one they have for you. If anybody is missing, you get an email that they’ve unfollowed you. I don’t know off the top of my head how often they check, but I would guess no more than once an hour and maybe as little as two or three times a day.
The thing is, if you sent more than one tweet between checks, then they have no clue which is to blame. All they can see is that so-and-so unfollowed you sometime between Check A and Check B, so they pin the blame on whatever tweet happens to be the last one you sent before they checked.
Even if they were monitoring in real-time, it would still be useless, because you’re dealing with humans. I’ll skip the 10,000 permutations, but there is no way to account for lag between me seeing a tweet and actually getting around to unfollowing, or for a variety of reasons for unfollowing that aren’t related to any particular tweet.
So, in your case, those 20 followers could each have unfollowed after a different tweet, or for a completely unrelated reason. Qwitter just knows that when it checked, they were gone, and that was the most recent tweet.
Justin, thanks for the info. However, I’m still neurotic. 😉
Umm..is Qwuitter free ?
I guess I’m weird, I don’t really care when/why someone unfollows me. Like me or not, whatever. I do the same as Justin and hit up friendorfollow.com every 4-6 months and unfollow people that aren’t following me that I’m not interested in anymore.
I’m sorry for digging this relatively old thread but i found out this very neat app as well: http://www.byebuddy.com
It doesn’t send you emails/direct messages or require you to log in so it might be worth checking out.