As Twitter surges toward an estimated 12 million registered users by year’s end (though some new stats may disagree), some of us are starting to deal with what we recently dubbed “followholism.” You’ve followed so many people, it’s hard to keep up, and it’s probably time to do a little housekeeping.

But where do you begin? Twitter’s own tools for managing followers are subpar. It’s nearly impossible to figure out who among your followers are following you back, and the interface for paging through followers is clumsy and difficult to use. Fortunately, Twitter’s API has given rise to a vast universe of amazing third party apps. So we’ve assembled a toolkit below of 10 services that can help you take control of Twitter and organize your followers. If you know any other tools that would be helpful for organizing tweeps, add them in the comments.

Find Out Who You’re Following

When I first joined Twitter, I started following people right out of the gate in order to get some utility out of the site — after all, the only way to join the conversation is to start following it. After I got used to Twitter, though, I had the urge to clean up my follow list. Eventually, I found that some of the people I had initially followed as a way to get into the community weren’t necessarily people that I was interested in continuing to follow. Here are some tools to help you investigate your tweeps and make an informed decision about whether to keep following them.

1. Twitter Grader - Using a detailed 5 piece algorithm, Twitter Grader assigns every users you run through its system a grade from 1-100. Using this tool you can investigate how engaged the people you’re following are and that can help you decide if you want to keep following them.

2. Twinfluence - Twinfluence is a scientific approach to measuring the influence of Twitter users. It’s another set of metrics you can use to help you figure out who you want to follow.

3. Tweetcloud - One of the most important factors when deciding whether you want to follow a Twitter user is what sort of content they tweet about. If someone tweets mostly about topics you don’t care about, they might not be the best person for you to follow. Tweetcloud creates a tag cloud of a person’s tweets to give you a bird’s eye view of the type of things they tweet about.

Find Your Friends

Not all relationships on Twitter are equal. Unlike many social networks, Twitter allows you to follow (most) people without their permission. There might be a bunch of people who are following you that you aren’t following back, and likewise there are probably some people you’re following who aren’t reciprocating. That’s not necessarily a bad thing — if their content is good, then you shouldn’t worry about whether they follow you back. But knowing who your friends are is helpful when you’re trying to organize your Twitter follows.

4. Twitter Karma - Twitter Karma is a great app that lets you sort through all of your follows and see who’s not following you in return, who you have a mutual follow/follow-back relationship with, and who is following you that you’re not following back.

5. Friend or Follow - Friend or Follow does essentially the same thing as Twitter Karma, helping you figure out who your friends, follows, and fans are on Twitter. The difference is in the presentation, and it might be a little easier to use for those with a large number of follows or followers.

6. Qwitter - Once you’ve done your initial cleaning, Qwitter is a nice app that will update you via email whenever someone stops following you. It will even let you know what you tweeted that caused them to stop following you, which could be useful (if you lose five followers every time you tweet about your cat, for example, that might be a hint to stop talking so much about your cat if you want to retain followers).

UPDATE: We’ve had some reports that Qwitter hasn’t been as reliable lately as it had been in the past. An alternative service that also notifies you when you lose a follower is Twitterless. If you really want to keep on top of when your followers jump ship, it might be a good idea to sign up for both services to make sure you have all your bases covered.

Get Rid of Inactives

According to a recent study, 80% of Twitter users have less than 10 total tweets. That might not be a bad thing — some people might join Twitter specifically to follow others and track their updates. But inactive users might also not be the best people for you to follow. Here are two tools that can help you weed out the inactives.

7. Nest.Unclutterer - Nest.Unclutterer will automatically block Twitter users who are following more than a certain number of people or who have been inactive for a certain number of days. You can specify those thresholds and white list certain tweeps so that they are exempt from the cleaning. Nest.Unclutterer is actually less about who you’re following, and more about making sure people following you are actually friends you want to be associated with.

8. Twitoria - Twitoria scans through your Twitter account and finds anyone who has been inactive for the past week, two weeks, month, two months, six months, or year.

Manage it All

Now that you’ve cleaned up your Twitter follow list, you’ll want to keep on top of things from here on out. Here are two apps that will help you better manage new follows and followers.

9. TweetSum - TweetSum digests all your new followers, rates them using what they call the DBI (”Douche Bag Index”), a number that supposedly weeds out Twitter users likely to be annoying, and then lets you easily follow them back or categorize them as tweeps you don’t want to follow. You can see a list of recent tweets for each new follower as well, which is helpful.

10. Tweepler - Tweepler is a new follower management application that lets you make quick, one click decisions about whether to follow people back or drop them into an ignore pile (out of sight, out of mind). In addition to being able to view recent tweets, Tweepler gives helpful stats about new followers, such as average tweets per day.

by Fern Richardson of Life on the Balcony - Follow her @LOTB

As Fredrickus mentioned the other day, there are many reasons why someone will follow you on Twitter. Many revolve around the fact that you followed them first. But what if there is a sizable discrepancy between the people you follow and the people who have followed you back? Assuming that you are publishing great tweets on a regular basis (and thus there isn’t a good reason for the lack of reciprocation), one tool you should check out is Less Friends, by the awesome Ruby on Rails developers at Less Everything.

After entering your Twitter user name and password, Less Friends will compare the people you are following to the people who are following you and divide everyone up into three groups:

• People who follow you but you don’t follow back (”they follow you”)
• People who you follow but who don’t follow you back (”you follow them”)
• People who you follow and also follow you back (”mutual following”)

You can use this data in a number of ways, but I want to highlight a way to use it to convert green “you follow them” people into blue “mutual following” people. It’s pretty simple. Click on the user IDs of “you follow them” people and read their recent tweets. See if they asked a question you can respond to, or maybe you know of a resource that would be helpful to them. Start replying to their tweets. Retweet their good tweets. More likely than not, they’ll notice how helpful you are and start following you.

The logic is pretty simple. You get what you give. And if someone has forgotten how good what you give is, give them the opportunity to remember. It is really important to not spam people though. That will have the opposite reaction you want from your “targets.” Just like everything you do in new media, the key to success is providing something useful.

Once you’ve converted someone you’re following into a follower, don’t stop once you’ve gained a new follower. Keep on providing useful and helpful a tweets! But since you’re reading TwiTip, I assume you already knew that, right?

© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips.

by Nathan Hangen - Follow him @nhangen.

I like to compare Twitter to a new relationship. At first, you are interested, but your guard is up. However, as time goes by, you find yourself spending more and more time together until the relationship blossoms and takes on a life of its own. Twitter has a great way of pulling you in like this in a way that no other social network can. Everyone seems warm and friendly and you quickly find that you can take your guard down and start talking with people from all over the world as if they were a guest in your home.

I love Twitter for this reason because it seems that it has never been easier to build so many relationships so quickly. This is really something most of us, unless we are celebrities, have never had to face before. That is, having to deal with thousands of friends at once. At first, a few hundred friends are easy to manage, but soon you have a list of thousands that you have to sort through. It can become a daunting task trying to keep up with everyone, much less interact with them. This is why I don’t think I’d be able to use Twitter without TweetDeck and why I think that the following advice just might save the Twitter interaction that you’ve come to love.

What we are going to do is turn a normal Twitter feed into something that is easy to use and makes interacting with people much easier. If you don’t have TweetDeck, then I highly recommend that you go and grab it now before you finish reading this post. Although Twhirl does come in handy for certain tasks, in my opinion, nothing works as seamlessly with Twitter as TweetDeck does.

Separate Your Follows

The first thing we are going to do is take a single Twitter feed and make it manageable by using groups to filter the people you follow. Since Tweet Deck only lets you have 10 panes open, I’d like to save a few for brand and personal searches. So in this instance, we are only going to add 3 groups. When you first install Tweet Deck, you’ll have a pane for friends, replies, DM’s, and a TwitScoop Window. This will leave you with 3 open panes for anything you wish down the road.

For now, I’d like to use the following strategy:

1. Create a group for friends that you either interact with often or who’s Tweets you don’t want to miss. You can call this group friends, associates, network, or any other name that you choose. We’ll use this group to highlight peers and associates so that you can reply and RT easily.

2. Create a group for new followers or people you would like to follow you. I like to use this group as a reminder to interact with people I haven’t really had a chance to meet yet. Sure, most people send auto-DM’s, but that isn’t really interacting. Although you will make an effort to monitor and interact with this group more than normal, the goal is to eventually move them to your friends group or the main “All Friends” pane.

3. Although it might sound corny, I also like to create a group for what I call “gurus” or “experts.” This group is usually relatively small, but this is the group where I place content experts. For instance, guys like @ChrisBrogan, @DarrenRowse, or @TonyRobbins will go here. Since I find it to be a good practice to keep up on what the experts are saying, this allows me to easily keep up with industry trends.

How to Use these Groups

Now that we’ve created these three groups, I’d like to share my strategy for using them. The first group is fairly obvious…you will reply and RT with your friends, trying to keep up while also bringing others into the conversation. I like to build my network by meeting the people that my friends hang out with and this is a great way to do so. Just watch for common names and you’ll start to recognize the names rather easily. Tweet Deck makes it really simple to follow them too, just click the name and then hit the follow button.

Another reason that this group works well is that Twitter seems to lose replies and DM’s rather often. Having the people most likely to send a reply to you in their own pane makes it easy to check for missed Tweets on other feeds.

To be honest, the second group strategy is a new tactic that I started using only recently. However, I’ve been using it for a few weeks now and it has really made it easier to expand my interaction on Twitter. Most of the time when you add a new follower they get lost in the Twitter stream pretty quickly. Eventually, you forget who you just met and who you’ve had on your list for longer periods. Having a separate pane of new friends makes it much easier to build relationships with them. Some of my favorite people on Twitter started out as new fans. People will instantly appreciate the fact that you’ve reached out to them and once you’ve done that it becomes much easier to build trust.

The last group of “gurus” or “experts” comes in handy for finding posts to RT or read. I also learn who they interact with on a regular basis, at which point I make an attempt to reply to or follow them. Although many of these people have tens of thousands of followers and don’t really have time to reply to everyone, if you make an attempt to reply every now and then they might recognize your name. This is the first step to getting noticed, which can lead to networking, guest posting, or joint venture opportunities. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting you spam this list, just keep it handy for staying up to date on industry trends and other people that you might want to follow.

Additional Twitter Tips

No Twitter post would be complete without some additional networking tactics and some Twitter etiquette to follow, so I’d like to offer just a few more tips that might help you improve your Twitter experience.

The first rule of thumb is that if you want to get noticed, then you need to help others get noticed. I can’t tell you how annoying it is to constantly be bombarded with self-made experts telling you how great they are hoping that you’ll believe it. I also grow tired of watching people spam their own links. If you really want to get noticed on Twitter, then you should help others get noticed first. Spend some time recommending people to your followers, whether it be a blog post, website, or a general follow recommendation. Many of the people that do well on Twitter spend more time giving than getting, so do your part to lift others up if you expect them to do the same for you.

Next, if you send an auto-DM or a Tweet that says you’ll do something, then back it up. If you say you’ll read a blog post, then do it and comment back about it. Don’t try and pull a fast one hoping that people will read your links anyway. This just isn’t a good way to do business and eventually someone will ask for your opinion. It also really bugs me when people send an auto-DM that asks about you, but when you reply they ignore your response. Sure, sometimes replies get lost, but don’t let that be your excuse. If you want to build a network on Twitter, then you need to stand by your word and do what you say. No one likes a liar.

Overall, I think most people have good intentions with Twitter, but there are always a few bad apples that spoil the bunch. Reaching out to others is a great way to build a group of fans and filtering your Twitter feed is a great way to do this. The key to using any social tool effectively is being able to access as much information as you can in as little time as possible. Tweet Deck groups make this incredibly easy and I think once you try these three techniques, you’ll find all sorts of new ways to use Twitter. Just make sure you share them with me when you get the chance!

© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips.

by Alexander Moya Barquero of Tecnovits (Spanish). Follow him @twivits.

Image by respres

Twitter tools have emerged all over the web, as this great service offers many ways to get in touch with people that really matter to you. However, safety is another of those things that matter and not all Twitter tools are trustworthy.

But don’t be alarmed, not all the tools out there are after your twitter identity! Let’s have a look at 11 twitter tools that don’t require your password and are still very useful and powerful:

Statistics:

TweetStats: Statistics for your Twitter account, this tool graphs the amount of hourly and monthly tweets of your account, the amount of replies and the interface that you use the most.

TwitterFriends: One of the most complete Twitter statistic tools, with just your twitter username you can find out very impressive statistics, but don’t just take my word for it, Darren wrote a more complete review of this tool: TwitterFriends - A Useful Twitter Metrics Tool

Ranks:

TwitterGrader: If you’re into ranks and grades, TwitterGrader will grade your account from 0 to 100 based on your account’s followers, following and number of tweets. You will also be given a rank, this will measure the impact of your account on the twitter sphere.

Are you in the Twitter Elite for your country? Use the tool and find out!

ReTweetRank: This tool ranks your account based on the number of retweets you get.

Tweeple Discovery:

NearbyTweets: Want to find tweeples near you? This tool finds people who tweeted near you, great tool for discovering new members to follow.

Twubble: Tired of subscribing to other accounts just so they can recommend people to subscribe to? (Yes @mrtweet, I’m talking about you.) By just filling out you twitter username, Twubble recommends user to follow based on your friends following. [Editor's Note: Update - Twubble does indeed ask you to log into Twitter's API with your username and password. - Lara]

Tweeple Unfollowing:

Twitoria: As time passes by and your “following” list becomes longer, there are bound to be a lot of spammy, unwanted, not used accounts, this tool tells your which of the accounts your following hasn’t updated recently in the last week, month or year and other time spans.

Qwitter: Besides having a very funny name, this tool will notify you by email when someone stops following you, and it only requires your username and an email address to send the notifications to (it also has a moving hand, so there’s another reason to use it).

[Editor's Note: Qwitter has been known to be pretty unreliable in terms of timely notifications. People have complained that they hear nothing for weeks or months, and then all of the sudden get 20 or 30 emails all at once, saying someone unfollowed them after their most recent tweet - when in reality, they may have unfollowed weeks ago, after a different one. - Lara]

FriendOrFollow: Find out who isn’t following you back with this tool.

Miscellaneous Fun Tools:

Tweetwasters: How much time do you spend on Twitter? This tool will tell you and only requires your username.

TweetWheel: This tool lets you find out which of your friends know each other, planning a party or going out for a movie? Find out who knows who with tool and avoid awkward moments.

Know other good Twitter tools that don’t require your password? Share them with us!

Get more tips and tutorials like this. Subscribe to our RSS feed or follow us on Twitter.

© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips.

by Web Designer, Copywriter and Author Sherice Jacob from iElectrify and Get Niche Quick (follow her at @sherice).

Who would’ve thought that a service like Twitter could help you not only reach more potential clients, but also help make your day more organized? Here are 10 “must have” Twitter applications and plugins to add to your marketing arsenal. Start using any one of these Twitter tools and watch your productivity (and your customer list) grow by leaps and bounds!

1. TweetDeck - TweetDeck not only shows you the last 200 tweets made by your followers and followees, but also organizes @ replies directed to you, direct messages, search terms and the latest news in the Twitterverse all into manageable columns.

2. Twhirl - Twhirl works similarly to TweetDeck, except it lets you access multiple Twitter accounts directly through the software. With Twhirl, you can keep your business and personal accounts separate without losing track of either of them.

2. Ping.fm - While not exclusively a Twitter tool, Ping.fm lets you broadcast Twitter tweets to other popular social networks including MySpace, Facebook, Hi5, and dozens more. Using ping.fm keeps everyone up-to-date on your current projects and widens your “social net” to attract more customers to your networking base.

3. Twitter Tools - Integrate your Wordpress blog with Twitter and vice versa. You can turn your blog headlines into tweets and your tweets into content for your blog. It’s also widget-friendly, so you can simply drag it to your Wordpress sidebar to display your latest tweets to your blog readers.

4. Tweetburner - Shorten, send out and track links sent via Twitter. See how many clicks your latest blog or article has generated. A great way to gauge the popularity of your content. See the most-clicked Twitter links on the Tweetburner homepage. Also works with FriendFeed.

5. GroupTweet - Perfect for when you only want certain messages to go out to a group of your followers, friends or family or for when you’re working on a web development project and need to send or receive client-confidential information. Registering is as simple as creating a group name and making its settings private in Twitter.

6. Twittercal - Integrate Twitter with your Google Calendar. By simply adding @gcal as a friend, you can tweet events, to-do’s and reminders directly to your Google Calendar and have it checked every minute.

7. Twitter Timer - To get reminders directly through Twitter, follow @timer and send a direct message to @timer as simple as 10 order pizza. It will remind you to order pizza in 10 minutes.

8. Tweetbeep - Get Twitter alerts whenever someone mentions any keyword you want to follow. Use it for your name, company name or to find potential clients (by getting an alert for the term “web development” for example). Tweetbeep works even if the original poster uses a URL shortening service like TinyURL.

9. Qwitter - Find out when you get un-followed by using Qwitter. Qwitter will not only alert you as to who is no longer following you, but they’ll show you the tweet you posted that (may or may not) have caused the person to unsubscribe.

10. TweetLater - TweetLater lets you schedule your tweets for a later date/time, saving you from being glued to Twitter. Also emails you keyword alerts, sends “thank you” notes to new followers and handles multiple Twitter accounts effortlessly.

Give these Twitter tools a try to help simplify your social networking while getting more exposure with half the effort. Reach more clients, free up more time and stay organized. Once you start using these Twitter applications and plugins, you’ll never know how you got along without them!

© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips.

by John Haydon (follow him at @johnhaydon) from Corporate Dollar

It’s not about you. I know, sounds cold but it’s true. It’s really not about you. It’s not about the number of followers YOU have on Twitter. It’s about how much value THEY gain from following you.

But in some ways, it’s not about them either.

In many ways it’s about your 2nd and even 3rd degree network - the folks who follow your followers.

It’s all about reach.

“But I have 7,357 followers on Twitter! Certainly that would mean that I reach more folks than my next door neighbor who has only 987 followers.”

Maybe. But maybe not.

Like my junk?

What’s powerful about Twitter is the potential for your message to be exposed to thousands of folks way beyond your immediate connections. This happens when your followers retweet something you posted or the followers of your followers (2nd degree folks) retweet something the your followers retweeted. There are a few tools that can measure this potential reach, but let’s focus on two:

1. Twinfluence

Twinfluence will show you four useful measurements of your Twitter network:

Second-Order Network: The number of folks that follow your followers. These are the folks that are exposed to replies and retweets from your followers. The more useful and/or *interesting your posts, the more likely your second-order network will retweet to their followers. Your 1st degree followers plus all their followers equals your reach.

Velocity: The average number of followers and second-order followers attracted per day is velocity. The larger your Twitter network is, the faster it grows. Again, posts that are useful and/or interesting.

Social Capital: The degree to which your followers have a high number of followers themselves determines your social capital. A user whose followers have an average of 200 followers each has a much more limited reach than another use whose followers have an average of 2,000 followers. Even if these two users have the same number of followers, their potential reach (the real story) is completely different.

Centralization: This indicates the degree to which you converse with a only a few other users. If, for example, you converse with only three users who each have 5,000 followers, your network is considered “fragile”. If one of these three users unfollows you, it could have a huge impact on your overall reach.

2. Twitter-Friends

Twitter-friends is a data geeks wet dream. A lot of very useful data that’s worth spending time understanding. For now though, start with these three measurements:

Network overlap: This graph shows you the level of two-way conversations you have with folks. As you become more “popular” on Twitter, it will be hard to tell how many replies from folks that you’ve missed. In my case, you’ll notice that the amount of incoming posts to me (@johnhaydon) is larger than my outgoing replies to folks. However, the overlap of these streams shows a fairly healthy two-way dialogue.

Conversation Quotient: This indicates the level of “spaminess”. The Twitter-Friends FAQ states, “People with a high CQ are using Twitter to have direct conversations with other users. People with a low CQ are using it more for broadcasting links or status messages.”

Retweet Quotient: This tells you how useful your junk is ;-). And we all know that long term success with any social media is driven by sincerity and usefulness.

An understanding of your Twitter network’s strengths and weaknesses will give you a good starting point in the direction that you want to go with Twitter.

© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips.

by LiveCrunch (@livecrunch)

TwitHawk launched not to long ago and first thing that came to my mind is OH another great tool to spam people! But just few hours later I convinced my self as well as @Twithawk that spamers have no place there.

With TwitHawk you can promote your profile, your product or for branding.

TwitHawk lets you reply to people that are using specific keywords on Twitter, it also lets you also auto-follow people that you send replay as well - learn more about it in their FAQ.

Here are few ideas I use TwitHawk for:

Branding my blog:

I target keyword “What is the best tech (technology) blog” - My answers

• “http://www.livecrunch.com is one of the best technology blogs
• “You should checkout Livecrunch.com I post about technology every day”
• etc…

Targeting specific audience:

I target keyword: “What is the best antivirus software” - My answers:

• “Not to long ago I posted about best 2009 Antivirus Software here http://tinyurl.com/8hejkz “
• “How about 5 best antivirus software? http://tinyurl.com/8hejkz”

In other words with TwitHawk you can really engage with other twitter people giving them something they look for, in return you get traffic to either specific blog posts or product you would like to promote. All you really have to watch out that you do not apear as spam and use your imagination on how to setup keywords vs your replies.

Note from Darren: as with many useful tools for Twitter, this one can probably be used both for good and ‘evil’. I’m sure spammers will try to harness it for their purposes but used well I think it also could have potential to start engaging relationships - if you’re willing to followup your tweets and the replies that they get with actual interaction.

The only other word of warning that I’d give (as someone yet to actually use this) is to choose keywords carefully. It strikes me that some keyworks would be used on Twitter many thousands of times a day - to use them could see you sending thousands of replies a day which can’t be great for your reputation as a Twitter users.

I like that TwitterHawk has added the feature to ‘confirm replies before they send’ - this makes a lot of sense as it means you can pick and choose who you reply to and tailor those replies. In a sense this makes TwitterHawk a tool that helps you monitor what people are saying around certain keywords and enables you to reply if you choose rather than having tweets go out automatically.

What do you think of TwitterHawk?

© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips.