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Who Unfollowed You on Twitter?
How to use the Twitter API to track your follows and unfollows
Are you posting regularly on Twitter? Do you get the occasional follower here and there? Are they unfollowing a few days later because you didn’t follow them back? Enough with that!
Let’s find out who is unfollowing so we can burn voodoo dolls with their names… oh, sorry, I’m getting ahead of myself. I mean, so we can learn the Twitter API!
This is what a lot of my experience on Twitter has been like since I started posting regularly at the beginning of this year. Somebody would follow me and a few days later unfollow — like a slow game of one step forward, one step back.
So a few weeks ago, I decided to have a look at the Twitter API to get more familiar with it and learn its features. Tracking the number of followers over time seemed like a good and simple starting point. As a side benefit, this also provides the names of the people who are unfollowing.
Finding Unfollowers
Twitter doesn’t give you a notification when somebody unfollows you, and that’s fine. It shouldn’t. But sometimes it would be nice to know who unfollowed your account anyway.
There are third-party tools that can track unfollows. Just do a quick Google…