I had a great reply from Cindy Frewen Wuellner over on this post and thought it was a good topic for another, so here goes.
Cindy’s question was that to do with having trouble following over 4500 people and keeping up with them all. At my suggestion she took a look at Refollow as a way of analyzing the people she follows and added:
Of my followings, none are ‘dead’ or ‘lazy’. No way to easily cull; I like them all. How do you suppose our friends w/ 20-40k ppl manage their twitter streams. @ImadNaffa says he just uses groups.
It is a good question Cindy. I follow over 3000 now and it is partly because I don’t want to miss anything, when I find interesting people I want to add them to the stream. But as I mentioned in another post, you can’t read everything, and no-one should expect you to.
Chris Brogan follows over 140,000 people on twitter and he also says that he spends around 60% of his time on twitter using Search. This is because he is looking for something.
Remember when the internet first started to get going in the early 90s and new people arrived who weren’t just the experienced techies? They started to read everything they found which was of interest. Pretty soon there was a cult of content consumers and everyone said ‘the internet is a time waster’. Then in the dot com boom the same thing happened but it had pictures.
Today we say the same thing about twitter but we have missed the point – twitter isn’t about browsing (though it is nice to browse a bit, I do this on the train) it is a tool for networking. Whatever you do you can’t have deep meaningful relationships with thousands of people, but you can build them step by step. Do this by search.
How to do it? Set up detailed advanced searches using the advance search on twitter for subjects of interest, geolocation and so on. Pick up the RSS feeds and add them to a reader, or put the searches into hootsuite or tweetdeck and make columns. Then when anyone (including people in your stream) tweets about your topics you can read a list of just those tweets and start engaging.
You can still read the stream too, but don’t try and read everything, you’ll just burn yourself out!
What matters here is what your objective is. My technique requires you to have one. Why not set up a behaviour that will deliver it?
Image: A Direction to Follow by batega
Su, you are a wealth of information. Yes, I’m with Chris Brogan on searches. I keep 5-6 search cols open and am an avid user of Addictomatic which opens 9 searches on a grid. Search is how I found so many lovely accounts to follow!! I am on twitter half to search, half to connect. it’s a feast. yet…. that’s how I got so many people!! There are so many interesting ppl and push accounts full of information, I bet I follow 500 feeds. Should chk on that. (Of course, they rarely follow back!)
thanks for your post, very helpful. Refollow is a fascinating tool. Not sure I will use it often, using those tools steals my connecting/searching/reading time. Now that it told me that I am not following any blank accounts, I am satisfied. They are all players and someday might give me another nugget of information for my knowledge base.
Cindy @urbanverse
.-= Cindy Frewen Wuellner´s last blog ..Earth Shoes Vs Flip Flops- Are College Grads Ever Ready letsblogoff =-.
Thanks Cindy,
I think its a good thing that you follow different people to those who follow you. This ability of twitter makes it a very open network and allows everyone to choose whose stuff they want to read. It also means when you RT people’s links you’re sharing them with people who aren’t following that person, but are following you for your filtering skills. Twitter hence brings out people’s personalities too.
The best way to get followers IMHO is to create useful content for your target audience because they will find it by search, and share it on if they like it too.
Great post Su!
One of the things that I do on Tweetdeck is aside from my typical cols I have one “at a glance” with all of my favorite people to follow. It saves me lots of time and keeps me very focused!
Thanks again for a wonderful post!
Respectfully,
Paul Castain
.-= Paul Castain´s last blog ..Is That All You Got =-.
Thanks for an excellent post. Columns have been working for me, but it isn’t enough. Your suggestions are very helpful and appreciated. And regardless of the technology of the day, relationships will always be built one step at a time.
Thanks for the compliment Gary, and yes, I agree with you, relationships are a long game.
I don’t have thousands to follow (I’m a bit cautious on following), but I do have a strategy for avoiding overload. I create a *private* Twitter List of VIPs that I want to follow very closely, and I mostly just read that VIP List stream, especially if I’m pressed for time. It has about 100 folks — I wouldn’t want to miss their tweets. (Call it VIP or Essential or Rockstars — whatever. Set it up as a private List so no one knows or gets offended.) Of course, I also have a bunch of topical Lists, which I dive into (less frequently) when I want to check in on that topic.
Hi Mitch,
That’s a great tip, thanks for sharing it!
Private twitter lists also let one follow people covertly. Wonder how many people would find that useful…
Really appreciate you commenting on my blog.
Su
Howdy this is kind of of off topic but I was wondering if blogs use WYSIWYG editors or if you have to manually code with HTML.
I’m starting a blog soon but have no coding expertise so I wanted to get guidance from someone with experience. Any help would be enormously appreciated!