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How to manage your twitter following numbers …
Once you’ve been on Twitter for a while, you might realise that you no longer keep up with all your tweets from those you are following – don’t panic, that’s ok – you’re not meant to!
Think about it, do you hear everything everyone says at a networking event? No, you get snippets of conversations here and there. Twitter is no different so relax and just dip and out of it when you want.
Once you start following hundreds of twitterers, you may find that at certain times of a day your main feed refreshes very often and it can become hard to read all the tweets being posted? If so, you have a few options:
1. Create Lists
Whether you use twitter.com or a twitter application such as tweetdeck or hootsuite, you can set up lists of your followers – effectively subsets of your entire following list.
Once you set up the list you can then make that your main feed so it’s easier for you to track the tweets from those you value most.
There are lots of other good reasons to use lists – you can read more about that in another blog post of mine here.
2. Use Global Filter (tweetdeck)
Most applications have a function to filter out tweets from people. Within tweetdeck you can filter out:
a person – all tweets from a person
a hash tag – if you see a lot of tweets alll carrying the same hash tag and it’s not of interest to you, just filter it out. (More on hash tags here if you’re wondering what a hashtag is!)
a source – fed up of seeing auto tweets from Facebook, or via API, foursquare etc? Filter them out.
Within Tweetdeck access Global Filter by clicking on the settings (spanner) button in the top right of the screen, then select ‘Global Filter‘ and follow the simple instructions.
3. Follow fewer people!
It’s always worthwhile having a good review of your followers say every 3 months – if people aren’t following you back then unfollow them (unless they are adding value to your stream). If they are following you back but there’s been no engagement with them, is it worth still following them?
There’s many schools of though on this topic but I’ll leave that to another blog post!
There’s no perfect app out there at the moment that helps you unfollow people easily/in bulk (if you know of one please shout) – here’s the best I’ve found:
FriendorFollow
ManageFlitter
The Twit Cleaner
There are also plenty of apps out there that will show you who has unfollowed you (and then broadcast to your followers that you’ve been unfollowed by so and so) – DON’T USE THEM – not everyone in the world will like you or like your tweets – get over it & spend your time finding new quality followers not stressing over those who have unfollowed you, most of whom are spammers and bots anway (unless you are losing followers at a rate of knots, then maybe you need a long hard look at how you are using twitter!).
If you have other techniques for managing your followers please share them in the comments, I’d love to know 
TTFN
Jan
Very informative! Totally agree about not stressing over the unfollowers – you can’t please all the people all the time…
Thanks Louise – I just think time could be better spent gaining new followers than worrying about those who unfollow – like you say you can’t please ‘em all (and how dull would that be!). Also most of the unfollow apps will tweet from your account saying you’re checking who’s unfollowing you, just think it sends out the wrong message.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts
Hi Jan
Great post about twitter and think those little applications are useful. We have a slight problem here, in that I’m the only one of the bunch who will actively engage in twitter – what do you suggest? I have suggested beatings and the like, but I am just laughed at.
On a more serious note, it’s important to have a strategy but not look to contrived about it either. As you know I have a personal account and really that all it is and it’s a private one too do to some unhelpful followers. As well as that we have the business one and this is the one we need to make the best of in the short time that we have each day to engage – perhaps I need to toddle along to one of your little groups one day, if only for an hour – just to have time to get away from the tweeting screen and think outside the bird box.
Thank you again for your candid and controlled blogs.
Tweet you later.
Joanna xx
Hi Joanna, thanks so much for your comments.
Re: getting buy in from other staff members – it’s a toughie, if someone just doesn’t get it or isn’t willing to give it a go, then don’t push it. Otherwise you’ll get half-hearted tweets for a few months and then a ‘I still don’t get it’. Not everyone gets the value or engagement or wants to do it in such a public way. I also think that where possible the same person tweeting from the business account has much more strength than when it is a team as it’s all about relationship building; difficult to do when you have a variety of people working an account.
As for strategy – agree it’s essential to have one but yes not to look to contrived about it – I add a very healthy dose of just me as a human being on top of any strategy I follow. The more effective twitterers I follow literally just engage, gain trust & respect as a result and then become the ‘go to’ business when someone has a query in their industry. I’m bound to say it but getting an objective eye to look over your online strategy would be beneficial, we all need to do it (myself included!).