We all know that Twitter‘s starting to reach the mainstream (um, Oprah?) and has been seeing significant growth over the past couple of years, but with all of that growth comes such massive amounts of noise that you can start to feel like you’re being pecked (or tweeted) to death. Here are a few ways to save your sanity:
Build the right-sized birdhouse
Assuming that you’re not one of those people who automatically follow everyone back, have you ever stopped to consider what criteria you’re using to decide who you *do* follow back? Are you following only friends (people you actually know and interact with in real life)? All social media friends (i.e. if you friend them on one service, you’ll friend them on all)? Local folks? Businesses? “Thought leaders”?
Take 5 minutes and make a list – what criteria does someone need to meet before you’ll follow them back on Twitter? Refer to this list if you want to keep the hawks out of your nest full of sparrows.
Handy Tools: MrTweet (@mrtweet), Friend or Follow (@friendorfollow), Twimailer (@twimailer)
Clean out your cage
That obnoxious guy that can’t stop talking about his new business venture, the conference live-tweeter, the “I’m going to feed all of my blog posts to your Twitter stream because everything I say must be important and relevant to your life” guy – unfollow them. Seriously, it’s as easy as one click, just do it.
Once you’ve followed someone for awhile, you get to know their hot topics – those that evoke heavy and consistent tweeting. If these hot topics are somewhat time-constrained (elections, sporting events, conferences), you can unfollow for that period of time and re-follow them after the event is over. Remember, it’s up to you to decide who to follow and why. If someone’s no longer meeting your criteria, unfollow them.
You can also unfollow inactive users, but if they’re inactive they’re not really contributing to the noise so…
Helpful Tools: NestUnclutter, MyCleenr (@mycleenr)
Use your binoculars
If you have (and want to keep) more than a handful of followers, you should start using your binoculars to focus on the critical information that’s coming through. TweetDeck (also available on the iPhone) and Seesmic Desktop are two popular tools that allow you to create groups (of people, of topics, etc.) and quickly view a parsed version of your Twitter stream. You don’t have to worry about missed “@s” or DMs. You can use a “close friends” group to stay in touch with your buddies, or a “businesses” group to keep up on sales or product announcements. You could even create a “conference” group to follow a specific event hashtag – letting you watch and participate in the conversation without trying to locate, follow (and later, unfollow) conference participants or speakers.
Handy Tools: TweetDeck (@tweetdeck), Seesmic Desktop (@seesmic_desktop)
What do you think? How do you manage (or manage to prevent) Twitter overload?
Related articles by Zemanta
- You: TweetDeck Has a Fierce Rival in Seesmic Desktop (mashable.com)
- Twitter to revamp homepage for the masses (news.cnet.com)
Popularity: 80% [?]
