Catfood Software Blog

Automatically follow and unfollow on Twitter with Catfood Follower

Catfood Follower is a desktop Twitter tool for following new friends that follow you and removing friends that don't follow you back. Follower supports Windows XP and Vista.

Download Catfood Follower (Current version: 1.10.0061)

Why auto-follow?

I have multiple twitter accounts. My personal account (@abfo) doesn't auto-follow. If you look interesting and not obviously spammy then I'll probably follow you back. Catfood Software (@CatfoodSoftware) will follow you backup using Catfood Follower. I've no idea if followers are Catfood customers or not so I want to follow everyone that signs up for Catfood updates.

Why auto-remove?

Twitter makes it hard to tell when someone you're following removes you. The auto-remove feature of Follower checks for friends who don't follow back and removes them. You can exclude users who you want to follow regardless.

How to use Catfood Follower

Follower supports multiple twitter accounts. For each account you can decide if you want to auto-follow, auto-remove or both. The screenshot above shows the settings for a single account.

You can add exclusions for both auto-follow and auto-remove. For auto-remove you can also set how many days to wait before removing a friend who is no longer following you. This prevents Follower from automatically removing new friends who haven't had a chance to follow you back yet.

Once you've entered rules for each account click the Test button on the main window. You can run the rules in test mode to see who would get followed and removed, or run in live mode to actually process the rules.

You can just run Follower manually when you want to run the rules, or you can use Task Scheduler to run it automatically. To schedule Follower (on Vista) run Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Task Scheduler. Click Create a Basic Task and follow the Wizard to set the schedule (i.e. once a day). If you accepted the defaults during installation then the path to Follower is "C:\Program Files\Catfood Software\Catfood Follower\Follower.exe". Running Follower with no arguments will automatically process the rules that you entered in Catfood Follower Settings. There is no display when Follower is running automatically.

Need Help?

If you have any problems or questions send me an email. If you have any feature suggestions please leave a comment below.

(Updated 2009-05-04 to 1.00.0108: Fixed a problem where new exceptions for an account were not processed, this led to Follower auto-removing exceptions. Also, the installer is now digitally signed.)

(Updated 2009-06-25 to 1.00.0122: Handle a twitter API bug with returning the correct number of friends/followers per page this is a critical update, added logging.)

(Updated 2009-07-21: Note that Follower does not follow new users for you. If you're looking to do this check out Twiogle Twitter Friend Adder.)

(Updated 2009-12-12 to 1.10.0061: Improved API limit handling, progress window during automatic processing, can now cancel and update. See Catfood Follower 1.10 for more information.)

Labels: Tools, Twitter

Posted by Rob on 4/12/2009, 34 comments. (Bookmark & Share)

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ExcepT list doesn't seem to work at all when you run a test or live test. It removes everyone regardless of if they are in the Except lisr

By Anonymous, at May 3, 2009 6:12 PM

Anonymous: Get in touch at http://www.catfood.net/contact.asp and I'll help you figure out what the problem is.

By Rob, at May 3, 2009 6:38 PM

Look good and helpful, hope everything working fine, thanks

By Stormy, at May 28, 2009 6:53 AM

Tested loading members list failed

By Stormy, at May 28, 2009 9:56 AM

Stormy: for support send me an email at http://www.catfood.net/contact.asp and I'll see if I can help you.

By Rob, at May 28, 2009 10:07 AM

Does not log on to my account, I'm using tweetdeck but I logged off and still does not log on. Any ideas?

By Tom, at June 5, 2009 1:23 PM

Tom: It could be that your firewall is the problem. Make sure that follower.exe is allowed to access the Internet. If this doesn't help send me a message at http://www.catfood.net/contact.asp.

By Rob, at June 5, 2009 1:59 PM

Can this work with sprnch aka twitteradvanced?

Thanks.

By KINGLIFER, at June 14, 2009 12:39 PM

KINGLIFER: Follower just follows/unfollows twitter friends based on the rules that you set. It doesn't handle any other services, just twitter.

By Rob, at June 14, 2009 6:18 PM

It is showing th ewrong amount of friends and followers for my account. Anything I shoudl do ?

By Eddy, at June 23, 2009 8:26 AM

Eddy, possibly it's running out of API requests before it can list all of your friends. How many friends and followers do you have? Please get in touch at http://www.catfood.net/contact.asp.

By Rob, at June 23, 2009 8:51 AM

I just posted a critical update for Eddy's problem - make sure you have 1.00.0122 or later. There is a Twitter bug that causes problems loading multiple pages of friends and followers. Follower now handles this bug.

By Rob, at June 25, 2009 11:24 AM

Your catfood installer failed to launch saying error 1603. Fix that up please.

By Anonymous, at July 1, 2009 6:30 PM

Anonymous - email me and I'll help diagnose the problem.

By Rob, at July 1, 2009 6:43 PM

this software rocks! you did an awesome job, I use it everyday.

Whish you had a aut responder as well.

Thank you for putting in the work and building a geat tool I reccommend to everyone i know.

Thomas Becks
internet-marketing-results.com

By internet marketing results, at September 22, 2009 9:33 PM

Thanks Thomas.

There's no auto-responder because I hate this practice - getting an impersonal DM immediately after you follow someone is pretty spammy. I understand that it can be useful but it's just not something that I want to encourage.

By Rob, at September 23, 2009 9:49 AM

trying to run 18 accounts, most of time i get the error:

cant load friendlist

can u built in 4 multiple account handling, only unique user in all accounts?

By Anonymous, at September 29, 2009 6:20 AM

Anonymous - eighteen accounts is a lot. I suspect that you're running out of Twitter API requests before Follower can load all of the account details. I need to improve this so that the process can be spread out over time for people with lots of accounts (or just large friend/follower counts).

I don't understand the second point. Could you explain what you want to do in more detail? Leave another comment or send me an email.

By Rob, at September 29, 2009 9:43 AM

no i dont " running out of Twitter API requests before Follower can load all of the account details." cause follower load one after another, but if it loaded the first users followers the error comes "cant load friendlist" or "cant load followerslist, but not every time, the second i need to have, if its posieble that you can count the request into twitter and if its run near to 100 or max 120 per hour you make a sleep(with a sign that prog is working and not hang) to the end of hour.

the wish for unique users(followers) means, that no user(followers) from first user-account is in other user-accounts followers and when than unfollow this in all otheruser-accounts, so you can have more followers at all.

by the way im scripting on a similar prog - in AHK - ;)

sory my bad english but its not my native language.

By Zoltan/Anonymous, at September 29, 2009 11:31 AM

Oh with these 18 accounts, i go >45 000 in 2 month!!

By Zoltan/Anonymous, at September 29, 2009 11:32 AM

Zoltan - thanks for the clarification. Yes, I'm planning to add a "sleep" function so that the API limit doesn't interfere with large batches.

I get the second request, I'll add it to the wish list.

If you do publish something let me know and I'll link to it here.

By Rob, at September 29, 2009 11:40 AM

I think twitter just changed the API because it stopped loading friends and followers lately. Has anyone else had this problem ?

By Anonymous, at October 19, 2009 2:08 PM

Anonymous - I'm not seeing a problem. Possibly you're hitting an API limit, possibly there was a problem with Twitter earlier and I can't reproduce the problem now.

How many friends/followers do you have? Do you get the same problem if you try again now? Feel free to email me or just post another comment.

By Rob, at October 19, 2009 7:10 PM

I have 2 accounts with a little over 2000 followers each.It could possibly be a twitter problem and its been happening for about a week. It just worked fine yesterday.
Thank You
Fred

By Anonymous, at October 20, 2009 3:08 PM

Downloaded the program to my laptop running vista.

Put in my twitter account details and tried to login

"login failed"

???

By Jessicae, at October 30, 2009 7:24 AM

Jessicae - I just replied to your email.

The most likely problem is that your firewall is blocking Catfood Follower.

If the firewall isn't a problem check that you can access your account using the same username and password at twitter.com.

It's also possible that the Twitter API is temporarily unavailable in which case trying again later might help.

By Rob, at October 30, 2009 8:52 AM

Anon that was happening to me too. It worked fine for about 2 weeks and now it refuses to load my friends.

It says: Login failed.

I can login to twitter.com so I know my passwords are correct. I also run the program as admin just in case, so I'm not sure whats going on.

By gnatelise, at December 5, 2009 12:07 PM

gnatelise: it's most likely a problem with API limits. I'll be working on an update to improve this soon.

By Rob, at December 5, 2009 3:29 PM

I just released an update - 1.10.0061. This is much better at handling API limits. I'd recommend that everyone upgrades to the new version.

By Rob, at December 12, 2009 2:33 PM

installed upgraded catfood follower. has error with windows xp on 2 computers.
fred

By Anonymous, at January 1, 2010 2:17 PM

Anonymous - could you let me know the exact error? Or send me a message and I can help you via email.

By Rob, at January 2, 2010 9:48 AM

A dialog box pops up and it just says windows encountered a problem and needs to close. thats it no error codes nothing.

By Anonymous, at January 2, 2010 6:19 PM

Anonymous - an immediate crash is most likely a problem with the .NET framework (a component that Follower depends on). Try running Windows Update and installing all .NET 2.0 and 3.5 updates. You may need to do this a few times if you haven't updated in a while. If this doesn't work find the .NET 2.0 framework in Control Panel -> Add/Remove Programs and choose the repair option.

By Rob, at January 3, 2010 9:04 AM

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Automatically follow and unfollow on Twitter with Catfood Follower

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