I challenge anyone to say that title three times and not end up sounding like Elmer Fudd or my 4 year old son. We all have to take a moment to clean out that closet or sweep out the garage after winter; spring cleaning season is right around the corner. Cleaning out your Twitter account and organizing some of your followers into lists is a must to keep on top of that social network and to be able to follow the social stream it produces.
I have not had an opportunity to clean out my stream for quite some time. It’s time to go through each of my followers to see if it’s necessary to follow them back and watch their conversations on my Twitter stream. Since October, I have gained nearly 2000 Twitter followers who I have yet to investigate and either follow back or trash. What do I mean by investigate? I look at every single follower or person interested in following my Twitter stream of messages. I do this because I want to know who is listening to my messages, and I want to find other like-minded people and those I might be interested in following. For that reason, I don’t turn on any “auto-follow” features. I want to know the followers I have and want to make sure my stream of information I read on Twitter is the best it can be. Many of highly-followed Twitterers do not go through this process. They end up having a large number of spammers, multilevel marketers, and those that just want to inflate their Twitter follower counts. I don’t want my own stream polluted with that type of follower. Let me give you a tour of what I do to keep my Twitter stream clean and my stream of Twitter info free from the debris of spam and meaningless messages.
When someone follows me on Twitter, I get an email that tells me that they have decided I am worthy of their following. That email includes their account information that I use to determine a potential relationship. My personal filtering system immediately kicks in and if you do not meet the following criteria I delete the email and go on to the next potential follower.
I won’t follow you if:
- No timeline tweets. (You have never sent a Twitter message.)
- No Twitter profile or bio.
- No Twitter picture or avatar.
- You follow a large number of people but they aren’t following you back. (To me, this represents a person trying to follow as many people as possible without building relationships.
I then have a 2nd level of filters that I use to weed out many of the people I follow. Many people on Twitter are there for nothing more than to broadcast their message without any intention of a conversation. These Twitter users are “link farmers” and “link pushers”. I am not interested in following them as they don’t communicate with their community. Another filter is that person who has 50,000 followers and friends and has fewer than 50 Tweets. How did they get so many followers with fewer than 50 brilliant tweets? This is what I call a Twitter gamer or someone that is gaming the Twitter system. I try not to allow this person into my stream.
Finally, many times I give people the benefit of the doubt if I think they may benefit me in knowledge or information or interesting tweets. If after a while I do not recognize them as a quality follower, I will unfollow them and give another the benefit of the doubt. It keeps my stream manageable and allows me to facilitate quality conversations in my Twitter account.
This my guide to how I separate the wheat from the Twitter chaff. It also allows me to have quality in my Twitter stream and my signal-to-noise ratio is more beneficial. Many people on Twitter have these types of filters or use a similar system. Adding quality to your account through beneficial tweets and not using the account for evil but for good will increase your followers. It will help to make you a top Twitter account others will want to follow and recommend to their friends, followers, and community.
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Tags: community, community building, social media, social networks, social stream, Twitter
