Streamlining Your Twitter Experience

If you’ve had the chance to attend any of my social media workshops, or hear me speak, or probably any other social media expert, you’ll likely have heard me say you cannot be successful on Twitter by following a handful of people. To use Twitter for business purposes, you’ll need to follow, and be followed by, lots of people. That can be overwhelming, so you’ll need to streamline your Twitter experience to make it easier to cope with.

Who Should You Follow on Twitter

Please don’t get me wrong. I’m NOT suggesting that you buy followers, or even that you follow a gabillion (that’s a real number, I’m sure) people willy-nilly. You do need to be strategic about whom you follow. You don’t want to follow a bunch of porn stars or spam bots. And the last thing you want is to have the appearance of following a high percentage of fake accounts (which is what often happens when you buy followers).

So, I do want you to follow lots of people…but the right people. If you’re a Halifax pizza shop, you’ll want to follow people in Halifax and watch for the people who talk about pizza. If you ship your jewellery anywhere in North America, you’ll want to follow jewellery lovers from all over North America. If you’re marketing to moms, find as many moms and mommy bloggers as you can. You get the picture.

Streamlining Your Twitter Experience

Following a lot of people can get a bit crazy. Even though statistics say less than half of accounts are active it’s still…a lot! How do you keep track of those people? How do you find the right conversations? How do you make sense of Twitter?

• Create lists to group like accounts with like accounts. This makes it easier to find your adamant pizza lovers or your industry stand-outs when you want to. Check out some of the lists I’ve created.
• Use a program like Social Bro or ManageFlitter to mass unfollow inappropriate, spammy or obviously fake accounts. I clean out my inactive accounts at least once a month.
• Use a dashboard like TweetDeck to create live columns to follow your most important lists, key words or hashtags.
• Go ahead and block or report spammers. You’re only doing everyone a favour.

In my opinion, a dashboard, in combination with lists, is the key to streamlining Twitter. I very rarely log in to Twitter.com anymore because I can see everything in TweetDeck all in one screen, without clicking through different places: main feed, mentions, direct messages and a list…maybe two if my screen is extra large.

If you’re a Twitter lover, share your best tip for streamlining your news feed in the comments below.