Following on from the last post, I want to bring to your attention an application which is perfect for those people like me who screen all of their followers on Twitter before deciding whether to follow back. I signed up for Topify last week and although it appeared to take a couple of days before the service started working for me, now that it has, it seems to be solving a lot of my problems.
The difficulty I had before I found Topify was that in order to look at each follower, I had to go into Twitter itself in order to view the profile of the person who followed me. From there I could have a look at their past tweets, how many followers they had and what their bio said about them. Although it was a relatively simple process, it wasn’t efficient – and efficiency is what matters. As a result, I would end up leaving it for a week or two, then scanning through my list of followers and selecting those who I thought I would want to follow just from that list.
Topify delivers an email to my inbox which alerts me of a new follower. However, within that email I am told:
- How many people they are following
- How many followers they have
- What their ratio of followers to followees is
- How many updates they have made
- Their full bio
- How long they have been on Twitter for
- And…their last 5 updates
From there, I can usually tell whether the follower is simply a marketer, and if so, I can decide whether I interested in what they are marketing. I can tell who they are from their bio, and how long they have been on Twitter. And best of all, if I want to follow them back, I simply need to reply to the email and I follow them – all without leaving Gmail.
If you are already following the person, the email tells you that and it allows you to send a direct message to that person by replying to the email. If you use the send feature to follow, then an email comes back telling you that you are now following that person and giving you the direct message option again.
Yes, there are a lot of emails, undoubtedly. But email is the one thing that I do check every single day. No matter how ‘old fashioned’ email may be, it is still the best aggregator around (in my humble opinion). Even going through 300 emails a day, many of which are alerts from social media sites, isn’t that painful. Most I delete or ignore, but they at least remind me that something has happened on one of the social media sites which I am involved with and to go and have a look.
Topify is still an invite only site although getting an invite is as easy as providing your Twitter username and your email address. Of all the new tools that I see every day, this is one that really is going to make my life a bit simpler. Now if they could all do that…
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