I’m experimenting a bit with Twitter & Twitter tools to increase my followers. Here’s a few things I found out already:

• An old bit of wisdom is the followers ratio. If you have more followers than people you’re following, wow, you must be an expert. If it’s the other way round, you must be a soccer mom catching up with the news through Twitter.
• Being friendly works. Somebody interesting started following you? Send a message and follow back. And use #ff to thank followers on Friday.
• I downloaded a free cheat sheet from Punk Rock Marketing that gives a number of interesting free tips. A friend of mine (@DeNijsDirk) used their Twitter Marketing That Doesn’t Suck to triple his followers in a month.

• I just tried out TweepDiff. It’s a simple and free website that compares your followers with who you are following. But that’s all it does. You can’t unfollow from the site, so it’s a laborious process of switching to a client to unfollow. Also, adding new people to follow isn’t possible. The information is useful, though.
• More capable is FriendOrFollow. In the free version, you get a thumbnail overview of who you are following, who follows you, who you mutually follow and people who stopped or started following you. Hovering over a thumbnail produces a popup with more details & actions. Not bad!

Which tools do you use to monitor your Twitter account? Any free tools that are useful? Other tips?