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SEO Service Finder
09-08-2011, 11:28 PM
Is it just me, or does anyone else finder Twitter to be overwhelming? At what point does the number of people you follow become counterproductive?

vangogh
09-09-2011, 02:30 AM
Following too many people does make it hard to find any real conversation. I don't know what the limit is, but I think somewhere in the 100-150 range is the maximum. However if you follow more people than that you can group them under various lists and keep those lists under the 150 count. Then you can more easily follow people again.

I've created several lists and follow people through those lists. I never look at my main timeline. I also have several saved searches so I can follow specific things I'm interested in. I tend to use Twitter more as a way to listen in on what other people are saying now. My own activity is mostly tweeting links to things I find interesting.

KristineS
09-09-2011, 01:09 PM
I've never really found Twitter overwhelming, but then I'm an advocate of strategic following. Instead of following a ton of people in an effort to get people to follow back, I set out to follow people who were relevant to what interested me, or in the case of our corporate Twitter account, to our business. People who tweet nonsense or who don't tweet often get deleted from our feed quite quickly. I also don't follow everyone who follows me. A lot of people are just looking to build up their follower numbers and I'm not interested in that.

There is a limit to how many people you can interact with successfully, but there are ways, as Vangogh pointed out, to organize who you follow. If you don't already know of it, TweetDeck is a very handy tool and does allow for organization of your account and followers.

vangogh
09-09-2011, 01:38 PM
I made the mistake early on of following many people simply because they followed me. It quickly made it difficult to follow my main timeline. A couple of years ago I started pairing down my followers and also adding them to lists to make it more manageable to follow what was being said. I probably need to do more of the same as I'm still following about 1,000 people total.

Lists are nice because you can still follow a lot of people, but keep the lists manageable. For example I follow a lot of web designers and also a lot of SEOs. When I want to see what's going on in the design world I can check my list of designers. When I want to see what's going on in the seo world I check my list of SEOs. The hard part is going back through all the people I'm following and adding them to lists. Twitter doesn't make that as easy as they could.

Stu_Upton
09-12-2011, 12:37 PM
As KristineS points out if you don't already use TweetDeck then it's really worth checking out, not only can you build lists but it's great console to see what's trending, any mentions you have had, etc.

And if you are starting to suffer from Tweet overload then it may be time to get ruthless, cut out any of the spammers and trim your lists down to those that really fill your needs, whether that be gurus, influencers or whatever and definitely don't feel obliged to follow someone just because they follow you, hopefully they picked to follow you because of the content you supply and not just to increase their number of followers in return.

vangogh
09-12-2011, 06:34 PM
Oddly I've never cared for TweetDeck, though I agree it's a great tool. Something about the way the columns are set up didn't work for me so I went with other Twitter desktop clients. I currently use the official Twitter for Mac since I used it when it was still Tweetie.

A Twitter client in general is a good way to make Twitter more manageable.

KristineS
09-13-2011, 12:24 PM
I was very anti TweetDeck for a long while, and now I love it. The nice thing is that there are several Twitter clients out there to choose from, so you can find the one that works for you. They do make working with Twitter easier, because the interface on the Twitter site isn't all that easy to organize, particularly if you want to watch out for or work with specific things.

vangogh
09-13-2011, 07:26 PM
The issue for me with TweetDeck has nothing to do with it's functionality. It's more that I don't care for the way the columns are organized. If I have it open wide enough to view enough it would mainly sit behind other windows I have open and I'd never look at it. When I reduced the size so only one column showed I have to deal with horizontal scrolling. Neither is a reason not to use TweetDeck of course, but it didn't work for me.

What it does those is great. I think it was really the first of the 3rd party apps to add so much more to Twitter. I'd still recommend it even if I don't personally use it.