Twitter: One to How Many?

- February 19, 2008 - by Chel, in blog, Twitter, with 11 comments -

A few weeks ago, @chrisbrogan, @DYKC, and @spin wrote a collaborative blog post on friending in social networking spaces and how they handle it. I used to take a Chris...

A few weeks ago, @chrisbrogan, @DYKC, and @spin wrote a collaborative blog post on friending in social networking spaces and how they handle it. I used to take a Chris Brogan approach to my friend adds, especially on Twitter. Then the issues started.

As of this writing, I have 764 followers. I tried following all of those people back for a while. There have been exceptions. In recent weeks I find myself cutting back and then re-adding people that I miss. Now this has been talked about before, but really it’s something that I want us to address.

With 557 people that I’m following, there are several things happening.

1) Because of Twitter’s API I’m not catching everything through Snitter, Twhirl or Twitterrific.
2) Because there are so many people I’m following I’m missing the good stuff that I want to hear about in people’s lives. The stuff that they think everyone knows because they Twitter it. 3) Twitter doesn’t work well with communicating important stuff. They are a new company (which cuts some slack). Until their system improves and opens up the API to more requests for clients, I’m never going to be able to keep up.

I realize there are people that have very few followers and followings. Twitter is my constant companion during the day. I. love. Twitter. The community has done amazing things, including Frozen Peas, helping AshPeaMomma’s family and helping Keith Burtis. We comfort, we laugh, we share and we reach out to others to let them know that we’re there and thinking of them.

My approach in different places like Facebook won’t work for Twitter. There are different rules for me. Maybe it’s just a question of overextending, if so that’s my problem. I want to read about your thoughts, none of these are “noise to me. If I want to follow everyone and still hear that conversation, shouldn’t I be able to do that? Am I dreaming here?

So what I want to know is this. How do you manage your followers? Do you create a separate private list? Do you just follow the people that you want to hear? How do you participate in conversation with many when all the conversation doesn’t come through? Okay, so that last one is a Twitter issue, but it’s important and I hope they can address it.

If a one to many conversation is important, when does many become too many?

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chelpixie

I'm loving all of the suggestions and comments. There are some really great suggestions. The biggest thing thus far for me is that once I follow it's hard for me to unfollow someone because I usually find profoundly interesting things from MOST of the people I follow. Now, I have done a mass unfollow in one setting and turned off some people that I didn't have a real conversation with. I had to because it was important to me to hear the people that I do have conversations going with. Ged, that's it exactly. It's an overload, which isn't USEFUL to anyone. Not to those I follow or those I read. The issue though to me, is that while Twitter didn't expect to get this big, having a way to organize information and staying organized from the start is the BEST way to start any venture. I wish that they could give us something to tag users with. This really isn't about popularity to me. I genuinely like reading those I am following. Jeff - I would agree with you but I'm seeing some folks use Twitter for more important communications and assuming that I am reading. I'm not always, especially when traveling. You have to DM me to get my attention if I'm away from my computer. Lori, Daniel, I think those systems are great, but a lot of work that I don't have a lot of time to follow. I love Twhirl. I don't love missing tweets. I need something reliable and at this point it looks like unfollowing is the only way to partly ensure that. Creating two accounts with two different clients running to keep up with the accounts takes up more of my time rather than less and it uses Twitter's servers lots more. Especially I'm liking Ann's approach, but I definitely need to come to terms with the solution Daniel mentioned. My mileage varies from other's. This is what it boils down to for each of us, isn't it?. Michael, I agree, there are some problems with Twitter and I just hope that they can resolve them so that some point in the future I can follow everyone I want in a way that doesn't subtract from participating.

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Daniel Johnson, Jr.

Twitter was essentially set up to provide only status updates to close friends, mainly via text msgs. Over the past 1-1/2 years people have been using it for much more than that. It sure has been interesting to see it evolve.

Michael J Pastor

A problem with Twitter (and sites likes Facebook) is that they treat everyone the same - all buddies are equal by kind and degree. They're not. Twitter is basically a broken chat model. Except in chat , the conversation can be segregated into rooms and Twitter and Facebook can't. The very premise of Twitter is broken.

David Beaudouin

Hey Chel: Good question, and no easy answer. My attention buffer fills quickly, so I take a "week at the beach" approach--jump in 2-3 times a day for refreshment. If I'm interested in a certain thread I'll backtrack it. Otherwise, I leave it to the Fates that important stuff will be sticky enough to get on my radar--how's that for a mixed metaphor! x/D.

AnnOhio

I have found that the optimum number for me of people to follow is 200. I let my list get up to 300+ and found I was missing the tweets of the people that I really enjoy following. My motto is if you're not adding to my life I'm subtracting you. When the numbers start creeping up I take a look at what each of the people on my list add to my experience and then *quietly* remove people from my list. If there is a friend I am worried about I may click on their page to see if things are better or if the wheels have fallen off and then send and encouraging DM.

I usually drop in to Twitter via Twhirl or the website to see what's going on at that particular moment in time. I use TwitterMail to catch replies, and I have GoogleTalk IM set up to receive direct messages. I also have direct messages emailed to me. All email related to Twitter passes through a GMail filter, skipping the Inbox, and labeled with something like "Twitter" or "bacn". I subscribe to a couple of RSS feeds via Terraminds.com, Twitterwhere, and - maybe (can't remember) - Yahoo! Pipes. I set up keyword tracking on Twitter, but it only appears to be working if you have phone notifications on. It works for me for now. As always, your use of social media may vary, and that's okay.

Kyle

I've definitely been there and I had to make the decision that Twitter (for me) was a place to hear from my professional network and what they are up to and at the same time I've also decided to cap the amount of folks I'm following to between 280-300. I did a major 'cleanse' a month or so ago and it has seemed to help me focus my Twitter stream and get what I want out of Twitter. /kff

Lori

What Ged said: "Whenever someone starts following me, I check their twitter page via the notification. If they have a website, I also check that out. If they have similar interests, or have similar sensibilities then I add them as a friend to follow. Otherwise, I just leave them be." I'm probably a little more generous than he (I certainly don't have a cap at 100) but I only add those I find really interesting. And, I only get notifications on some of them. ...and I'm using Tweet bar to keep up with my business Twitter account and Meebo IM to keep up with my personal one.

Jeff Barr

You have to think of Tweets as little notes floating down a fast-moving river. You are going to be able to catch and to read some of them but many others will just flow by unread. Anything truly important will probably reach you via one or more other channels anyway.

Ged Maheux

Whenever someone starts following you, there is a temptation to follow them back. This leads to friend bloat and tweet overload. I try to stay at around 100 or so followers. That number is manageable for the most part. Whenever someone starts following me, I check their twitter page via the notification. If they have a website, I also check that out. If they have similar interests, or have similar sensibilities then I add them as a friend to follow. Otherwise, I just leave them be. Of the 100 people I follow, only about 30-40 tweet daily or semi daily, so I don't get overloaded with information. This really is the way to go. Anyone like iJustine that is following 3000+ people is just doing it as a popularity contest. You might as well follow the public feed. There's just no point.

Ed Roberts

I have been very much in the same boat. Twirl checks every two minutes, and I seem to have 6 new tweets to read EVERY time. It's so easy to get social media-induced attention deficit disorder. Like you, I've dropped a few people. I've also taken advantage of the RSS feed for people I want to follow the most. That way, I can do a quick sweep of their tweets at another time if I want to make sure I don't miss something. That too, can be more of a bulk-delete thing, but it affords me the opportunity to quickly catch up if I want to.

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Twitter: One to How Many?