Not all Twitter followers are equal. Some users will engage with your posts, while others only view them when your tweets appear in their timelines. There are also inactive Twitter followers, i.e., people who no longer use their accounts. These users don’t have any value and can affect your account’s reputation over time.
This guide walks you through the steps to identify and remove these followers. It also shows which third-party tools you can use to speed up this process. If you want to know how to remove inactive accounts from your follower list, keep reading this article.
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Check Inactive Followers Twitter: 3 Tips To Find Dormant Accounts
Twitter, aka X, doesn’t consider an account’s activity levels to determine whether it is active or inactive. The platform has a different standard for identifying dormant profiles.
It looks at your last login date to determine if your account is active. As long as you log in once every 30 days, the platform considers your profile active.
It’s important to note that not everyone who follows you will see your tweets. Your posts may appear only in a certain percentage of your followers’ timelines. In other words, you can’t use engagement rates data to check for active followers.
The following sections cover three ways to find dormant accounts in your following list.
1. Look at the Last Time the Account Posted a Tweet
One way to identify inactive followers is to look at when they published their latest tweet. This method only works for accounts that post regularly. The majority of Twitter’s user base won’t tweet for various reasons. In other words, they only use their accounts to see what’s happening on this social media platform.
If the account was active and suddenly stopped posting for a period of time, it’s clear the profile is inactive.
2. Send a Direct Message or Mention the User in a Tweet
This may seem like a lot of effort, but it’s a simple way to weed out inactive followers. Just send the direct message (DM) to multiple users and see if they respond. Another way to test whether the user is active is to mention them in a tweet.
This may seem strange, especially to your followers. But you can easily point out who is inactive if they don’t reply for months on end.
3. Use a Third-Party Tool To Analyze Your Followers
The above methods work when you have a few hundred followers. What if thousands or tens of thousands of users are in your follower base? In such situations, manually verifying if the user is active is time-consuming.
This is where you need third-party tools to analyze your followers. Services like FollowerAudit are a good starting point. They scan your follower list and use an advanced algorithm to identify dormant users.
It also shows you the following metrics, giving you deeper insight into your followers:
- The age of the account and the date they published their latest tweet.
- The language they use on Twitter.
- Their following, follower, and tweet count.
It comes with a free package to audit up to 5,000 followers. You can run up to two audits every day and download the report to your device. However, your following list of accounts should be at least 200 to use this service.
How To Delete Inactive Twitter Followers: 2 Effective Methods
Let’s say you discovered several dormant accounts in your follower list. How do you delete inactive Twitter followers? The guides below show two ways to remove multiple followers quickly.
1. Remove Inactive X Followers Manually
You can remove inactive followers on X by following this guide below:
Desktop browser:
- Sign in to your X account.
- Left-click the Profile button on the side panel.
- Left-click the follower count on your profile page to see a list of all the users who follow you.
- Click the overflow or horizontal three-dot button to the right of the user’s card to see the dropdown menu.
- Select Remove This Follower, and a popup will appear explaining what will happen.
- Left-click the Remove button to remove the user from your follower list.
Mobile app:
Note: As of October 2024, the Remove This Follower option isn’t available on the app. Therefore, the only option is to block the user.
- Go to your X account after you sign in to your page.
- You must tap the profile picture button on the app and select Profile from the slide-out menu.
- Tap the follower count to see all the users that follow you.
- Tap the user’s display name to go to their profile page.
- Tap the vertical three-dot button on their banner image.
- Select Block, and a popup will appear, informing you what will happen. Tap the Block button to remove the user from the list of followers.
- You’ll need to repeat steps 2 – 6 to remove multiple users.
2. Use Audiense To Identify Multiple Inactive Followers Quickly
Audiense gives you in-depth information about your Twitter followers, making it the right tool to identify inactive accounts. Earlier, this tool allowed you to block multiple profiles from your dashboard. However, this option is no longer available.
There is another way to remove inactive followers, as highlighted in the following guide:
- Visit Audiense on a desktop browser and sign in to your Insights account. If you don’t have an Insights account, create one and link your Twitter profile to it.
- Open your Twitter account dashboard on Audience Insights.
- Locate the Inactive Followers card and open it.
- You’ll get a list of users who aren’t active on the platform. Note all the usernames in this list.
- Go to your X timeline, i.e., the homepage, after you sign in to your account.
- Enter the person’s Twitter username into the search bar and go to their profile page.
- Left-click the horizontal three-dot or overflow button to see the dropdown menu.
- Left-click the Remove This Follower button and select Remove in the popup.
- Repeat steps 6 – 8 till there are no more inactive followers.
How To Find Inactive Twitter Accounts You Follow
What if you follow a Twitter user and they become inactive after a while? Although this is not as big an issue as dormant followers, it is still problematic.
Why? Well, X only lets you follow up to 5,000 accounts initially. Only after you get a healthy ratio of followers to following will the platform let you follow more people.
If you hit the 5,000 limit, you’ll need to unfollow people. Who should you remove from this list? The answer is simple — inactive profiles.
There are two ways to detect such users, as highlighted below:
- Use third-party follower analysis Twitter tools like Audiense: Audiense Insights dashboard has a section that shows inactive users you follow. This is quick and efficient, as the tool will identify dormant accounts.
- Manually comb through your following list: The other solution is to analyze your Twitter following list and remove unwanted users manually. You should check when they last tweeted as a measuring stick for inactivity. However, as highlighted earlier, this may not always be the right way, as not everyone tweets regularly.
Remove Specific Tweets Quickly With TweetDelete
Inactive followers, while harmless, can become a problem as your popularity grows on this platform. The best solution is to remove such users.
When people try to see if your account is active or inactive, they’ll go through your older tweets. If there’s anything that can damage your reputation, they’ll share it with others. The effects of Twitter can spill over to the real world, i.e., it can impact your life.
Due to the negative publicity, you may find it harder to land a new job. Moreover, your reputation takes a hit. The easiest solution is TweetDelete, which can remove any number of tweets in seconds. The mass-delete tweets utility and auto-delete tweets tasks are all you’ll ever need. They can remove thousands of posts quickly.
You can also delete all your tweets to give your profile a second start. TweetDelete’s custom filters give these tools their power, as they list posts by date range, keywords, hashtags, and tweet type.
As a bonus, it can delete your likes via the unlike tweets feature. This removes your likes to protect your online privacy.
Join TweetDelete today and use this inactive Twitter followers guide to give your profile a professional makeover!
FAQ on Inactive Followers on X
This section focuses on queries you will have about Twitter followers inactive:
Why should you remove inactive followers on Twitter?
You should remove inactive followers on Twitter for the following reasons:
• They won’t engage with your posts.
• They can damage your reputation, as people may assume they are fake followers.
• They can throw off your analytics, especially if they engaged with your posts a while ago.
Will Twitter delete inactive accounts?
Yes, Twitter will permanently remove inactive accounts if they don’t sign in for over 30 days. X changed the duration to identify accounts as inactive from logging in once every six months to 30 days.
Under the guidance of the new Twitter leadership, the platform announced its plans to purge dormant accounts.
How do you track inactive accounts?
You can track inactive accounts with third-party tools like Audiense and FollowerAnalytics. They analyze your followers and separate all the dormant accounts from the active users. You can also do this manually, but the process is time-consuming.
