Heath Mullikin

I am a huge fan of Twitter and other social media.  At the point where I was trying to build 2 blogs, make a little money online, and connect with people around the world I made the decision to use a program called TweetAdder.  TweetAdder is a tool that allows you automatically follow back anyone who follows you on Twitter, send messages automatically, and do things that can gain you a large following.  I was obsessed with my follower count.  At one point, @chaseurlion was over 40,000 followers, @chaseyourlion was over 15,000, and @heathmullikin was over 20,000.  I was trying to build a brand, but instead I built a monster.

There are lots of people who use tools like Tweet Adder to spam the world.  I tried not to be one of those people.  I was content to follow people based on certain criteria and unfollow them based on other things.  Out of over 75,000 followers, only about 30% were real people.  Now, did this tool and strategy help me connect with great people I wouldn’t have met otherwise?  Absolutely. In the process was I following around 75,000 people myself?  Yes, and many of them were sketchy to say the least.  I knew it was time for a Twitter Reboot.

A few things have happened over time to bring me to this place.  First, there was a run of great people who decided to unfollow everyone and start all over on Twitter.  Michael Hyatt blogged about it here and he heard about it from Chris Brogan.  Now, I’m not going unfollow everyone, but I am going unfollow a lot of people.  Secondly, I decided that managing multiple accounts and blogs was not in my best interests.  Finally, I realized that every connection mattered.  Being followed by a spam California real estate firm with 100,000 followers was far less important than connecting with a college student with 25 serious followers.  TweetAdder had taken true intentionality and connection out of the equation.

Enter ManageFlitter.  Erik Fisher from Beyond the To Do List recommended this service and I am loving it so far.  ManageFlitter is not a bot that runs 24/7.  It allows you to really see who’s following you and who you’re following.  My favorite feature is that I’ve been able to see who’s tweeting too much(spammers) and who’s not tweeting at all(quitters).  Neither of these groups are real connections so unfollow away!  It also has a great Whitelist and block feature.  I can list everyone I know and never want to unfollow(Whitelist) and blocking means that I will never follow that person and they are unable to follow, DM or @mention me.  There are all sorts of great uses for ManageFlitter, but right now I’m concentrating on making all of my connections count.  Did I mention that they have a free version?

All of this is part of a strategy involving two projects I’m working on this year.  It will all tie in with the calling God has placed on my life and some great opportunities ahead of me.  Call all of this “Launch Preparations.”