Tool Tuesday: Qwitter
If you or your company is spending a lot of time crafting stories, being human and creating relationships you may occasionally find yourself with a Twitter tunnel vision. That is to say, you feel like things are going great, you’re having engaging conversations regularly and feel as though you even have some “friends” in Twitter.
Its easy to get lulled into a false sense of success. At this point, a wake-up call is imperative. We should never sit on our laurels in social media. Enter Qwitter.
This simple to use and free (for basic) service alerts you everyday to your latest Twitter Unfollows. Why is this important? Whether you are a personal brand or a corporate brand or a small company, this daily review is a decent pulse-taking exercise on the reactions to your recent activity. Using a form like this, if you are tracking your follows AND unfollows, you’ll begin to get a feel for how your content is reverberating across the Twitter-sphere.With trend tracking you can more easily identify which type of content is engaging or turning off and as importantly, you’ll see who is following and unfollowing and see if there is reason for concern.
What I like:
Unobtrusive: Its a single email once a day.  Yes, the free version includes advertising, but I don’t mind the advertising – after all, someone has to pay for the services I’m receiving. The paid version provides for ad-free emails.
Easy to use: The list is of Twitter followers with links to their profiles. A quick set of clicks will tell me if these “unfollows” should denote a response. Responses may vary, but business users may choose to reach out to particularly active or influential followers who have suddenly stopped following. There might be a message or story there.
Low Barrier of Entry: Unlike so many free services where the balance of information the user receives vs. information the user gives , Qwitter strikes a simple balance, it provides simple, basic information and only asks for two things: Twitter screen name and email address. To date, I have not received any spam that I can trace back to Qwitter, indeed, my emails from them are simply those that I have requested.
Not everything to everybody: Qwitter is a simple service that does what it says it does and does it well. It isn’t overwhelming or a massive time-suck like other Twitter services. In fact, its hard to believe this, but the emails aren’t even crafted to take you back to the Qwitter page.
What I wish could be improved:
Export List: I wish the lists of “unfollows” could be exported to a spreadsheet that showed the day and time of the unfollow. I typically recommend that my clients track this list on a daily basis and compare it to their content conversations. This is time consuming, but there can be some rich information there and watching trends can be invaluable. That would be worth paying for!
