How to track followers over time on Twitter

If you have a Twitter account and want to promote and market your business or brand, you’ll need to learn to use it effectively.

This article will explain why tracking followers is important and what you can do with the data you collect.

We’ll also introduce you to five of the best Twitter follower tools to analyze your Twitter follower counts, view your tweet performance in real-time, and help you understand the perfect time to post.

No one likes my tweet! Why tracking followers is important

Most people who have Twitter accounts don’t know how to use Twitter!

Unless you’re famous or viral, having thousands of followers won’t just happen for you. There are 1.3 billion Twitter accounts in existence, and 391 million of them don’t have ANY followers!

Creating popular tweets is about understanding one tweet’s performance relative to another.

The time of day you tweet matters, as does how it trends over time, and whether it contained the right content to reach your target audience.

To get more followers, you’ll need to know what works and why—you’ll have to develop well-thought-out social media strategies, learn to use Twitter analytics tools, and understand why follower count, tweet metrics, and engagement rates matter.

You’ll also have to learn to spot fake followers and bot accounts, track accounts that unfollow you, and spot the trolls and inactive followers that never engage with your tweets.

For that, you’re going to need some good software!

Get to know your Twitter analytics

One major key to your success lies in understanding the patterns in your tweet performance, your follower’s characteristics, and the types of content they engage with.

One of the single biggest factors in growing your average tweet engagement is awareness about what works.

Ask yourself: are there any common patterns in your follower growth?

  • Does your follower count grow steadily throughout the week? Or does it spike during a certain period?
  • Do some of your followers follow you back? If so, when?
  • Do they only follow you after you’ve tweeted something interesting?
  • Do they unfollow you quickly after following you?

This is crucial information if you want to grow your Twitter following. Let’s take a look at some tools to help you do that.


Five killer tools to explode your Twitter follower growth!

Circleboom Twitter

A complete Twitter management tool for your Twitter strategy

CircleBoom offers all the features you’d expect from a full-featured Twitter client and provides actionable insights into the effectiveness of your tweets. It also allows you to pick the perfect time to make your social media presence felt.

Key Features

Schedule Tweets: Set the time and date to post and bulk post tweets to multiple Twitter accounts and time zones.

Smart unfollow: Circleboom Twitter shows all the accounts not following you, and allows you to unfollow inactive accounts with a single click. 

List your verified followers, remove fake followers in bulk, and eliminate all those inactive bots and spam Twitter followers.

Advanced Twitter analytics tools: Learn everything about your audience, and gain valuable insight into trending hashtags, the effectiveness of tweets, and your follower characteristics.

Export detailed Twitter analytics and gain an overview of your target audience.

Complete Follower audit: Search someone’s followers and friends to see a list of the Twitter users they follow.

Summary

Circleboom Twitter has an absolute ton of tools to improve the effectiveness of your Twitter content strategy. It’s easy to delete and remove tweets, likes, and retweets and you can manage your Twitter archive with minimal fuss. 

That said, it isn’t cheap, a monthly subscription will cost you a minimum of $17.99.

Link: Circleboom Twitter


Unfollower Stats

Track Twitter unfollowers over time

the dashboard for the twitter app

Unfollower Stats helps you to see how many of your Twitter followers are following and unfollowing you.

It also lets you view their tweet count and see how long it’s been since their account was last active.

Finally, it makes it easy to find inactive accounts and unfollow them with a single click. 

Key Features

Dashboard– A central hub for tracking your Twitter activities the dashboard provides an overview of all your Twitter analytics.

It lets you view new followers vs. unfollowers, basic Twitters stats for all your tweets, a word cloud of your most used words, and who your most recent followers are, as well as hashtags, device stats, and more.

Sidebar navigation – Switch between views for followers, non-followers, and accounts you don’t follow back, as well as a whitelist, blacklist, mute, and block.

Summary:

Unfollower Stats doesn’t let you schedule posts, or provide highly segmented information about your follower characteristics.

It’s competitively priced and helps to keep track of your Twitter follower’s growth, monitor your own followers and unfollowers, and give a clear overview of the most important things happening on your account.

As such it’s a very useful and capable tool.

Link: UnfollowerStats


TwitterAudit

For deleting those pesky fake & bot accounts

three smartphones with the app on the screen

A free, easy-to-use tool TwitterAudit, will quickly scan your Twitter account, analyze your follower list, and bring back a list of suspected fake, inactive, or bot followers.

It will also provide you with a quality score for your account.

Key Features

Check if your followers are real: Audit your follower list or any public Twitter account to identify fake, inactive, or bot followers.

Block fake followers: Instantly analyze and block suspected fake accounts.

Check your competition: Run audits on your competitors, to see if they have purchased lots of fake followers.

Summary

TwitterAudit is a safe, simple tool that lets you look at your follower list and then flag those accounts that may be fake.

It’s a health checkup for your Twitter profile and will lessen the grip of bots and fake followers on your account.

Link: TwitterAudit


FollowerWonk

Find, analyze & optimize your Twitter followers

Followerwonk helps you identify who your followers are and helps you connect with accounts that share your interests. 

Key Features

Search Twitter profiles: Easily identify the Twitter users you share common interests with by typing the search term you want to match. Followerwonk displays those searches in a list.

Analyze Twitter accounts: The analytics dashboard lets you view Twitter account activity by location, gender, age, and language. You can also see who that account follows, and who’s followed by them.

Tracking & sorting: Track your Twitter accounts and those of your competitors to see who is losing and gaining followers.

Summary:

Followerwonk offers custom reports, excellent tools to visualize follower stats, and tracks a wide variety of Twitter analytics.

It’s a well-priced option to increase Twitter impressions and engagements, see what tweets are working for your competitors and hone your social media strategy to reach your all-important audience.

Link: FollowerWonk


Twitonomy

Twitter analytics & more

Twitonomy isn’t the most well-known app here, but it’s well-featured and fairly priced.

It offers detailed visual Twitter analytics and provides visual views on hashtags, replies, retweets, and mentions, as well as solid search, filter, and monitoring tools.

Key Features

Detailed Twitter analytics: From the main dashboard, access tabs for mentions and retweets, lists, followers, following, search, and more.

Backup & export: Export your tweets, retweets, mentions, and reports in Excel or PDF format in a single click. 

Monitoring tools: Monitor and pin lists, and favorite users, see how followers change over time, get a list of users who don’t follow you back, and browse, sort, and remove people.


Summary:

Twitonomy is priced at $20 a month, and compared to some of the much more expensive analytics dashboards providing Twitter stats and engagement info it’s priced competitively.

While it doesn’t offer EVERY bell and whistle, it’s an advanced Twitter tracking tool at a fraction of the cost.

Link: Twitonomy

By now, you should have a much better understanding of what you need to pay attention to on your Twitter feed.

Posting popular tweets and raising the engagement rate of your posts to achieve more clicks and win thousands of followers takes more than blind tweeting. It takes clear focus and some good software.

The analytics dashboard tools introduced in this article will go a long way to help you get better Twitter impression stats and create more successful Twitter posts.

Metrics like your average tweet engagement and average tweet performance are important. But what matters most, are the types of tweets you share.

Your Twitter content needs to add value to your followers and be something they actively want to follow and engage with.

Quality is the most important metric of all!

Thanks for reading. Please consider signing up for a free TwitterAudit account.

Getting rid of those fake spam and bot accounts is a GREAT way to get started! 😉