I joined Twitter on April 6, 2008. I quickly connected with other people like me … climbers … by searching for and connecting with people who talked about #climb. In addition, I used Twitter to drive traffic to my blog (and vice versa).
Rapidly, I built a long list of Twitter and real-life relationships with climbing partners, outdoor industry professionals, big brains in various industries of interest to me and #kickassgirls and boys all over the world.
When a new follower connected with me, I’d manually check out their profile, and follow them back if they weren’t a spammer or bot.
Fast forward two and a half years, and the number of people I followed had gotten completely out of control. When I followed 25 or even 250 people, I was able to form strong bonds through conversation on Twitter, and to really get to know interesting people who over time, I became interested in meeting in real life. When I followed more than 2,000 people, even with sophisticated lists and searching, I found it nearly impossible to do anything other than broadcast my own content, and keep up with @reply messages.
Twitter’s value, for me, is in meeting new, interesting people and building relationships with them toward ultimately meeting in person. Maybe that makes me an atypical social media user, but that’s my MO. Acquiring followers and people to follow is of less interest to me than making meaningful connections with interesting people.
I’ve found myself, in the last few months, questioning whether Twitter’s noise-to-signal ratio makes it worthless for forming new relationships, now that the service is so “big.”
Rather than give up on Twitter, I decided to prune the number of people I follow. Mercilessly.
It’s working, already… I already feel more connected with the people I follow, and like I can — in a few minutes here and there — keep up with the people that I care about, and the people that I would like to get to know better.
Here’s how I reduced the number of people I follow, in order to increase Twitter’s signal-to-noise ratio.
Step One: Protect your closest connections.
I used ReFollow.com to “Lock” those people that I absolutely did NOT want to unfollow. The first time I used ReFollow, I went through and manually “Locked” the top 30 or so people I know in real life… my closest friends on Twitter. These are the folks that, even if we haven’t talked in a few weeks or months, I don’t want to lose track of. If they take six months off from Twitter then come back, I want to see what they have to say.
Step Two: Keep the wheat
Because conversation is what’s important to me about Twitter, I used ReFollow to Show users who have @mentioned me. I then clicked “more” to load as many as ReFollow would load. These folks… the people who listen enough to @reply to me… are more likely to be people I want to get to know better. I “locked” the whole of them, a total of 790 people, and followed back the ones that I hadn’t yet.
Step Three: Weed by hand
Rather than just then “Unfollow” everybody who wasn’t on my “close friends” list, or my @mentions, I used ReFollow to manually review the entire list of everybody left over. I didn’t spend a ton of time making my decisions… I just did a quick review of avatar, username, and their details (ReFollow gives a great “hover over” bit of information) and followed back interesting people I had missed, and locked the people that I was following that I wanted to continue to follow regardless of whether they follow me, or whether they’ve recently @mentioned me. This took time. A few sessions, over a couple of days, in fact. But it was worth it — I caught a lot of people during this review whose content I value, and, I’m not sure ReFollow’s @mentions filter goes back to the beginning — I found people in my manual review that I know I’ve had conversations with that ReFollow’s filter didn’t pick up, and others that I’ve conversed with via Direct Messages.
Step Four: Lose the chaff
At this point, everybody I knew I wanted to keep following, as close as I could tell was “Locked” via ReFollow. It was time to “Unfollow” the rest.
ReFollow displays a warning that mass following and unfollowing is a violation of Twitter’s Terms of Service. I took the gamble, and used their “UnFollow” tool, regardless. I wound up unfollowing somewhere under a thousand accounts today (after I’d done a semi-manual purge a few weeks ago) and my account wasn’t suspended… but your mileage may vary, and using any kind of mass unfollow tool is at your own risk.
Step Five: Fix mistakes, and repair relationships
Inevitably, you’re going to miss some valued people. Once I’d finished the purge, I sent a note out on Twitter to let folks know that I’d just done a big purge, and to please speak up if I’d unfollowed them. A few people — mostly newer connections I hadn’t yet followed back spoke up — which is great… now I know they’re listening, and I followed back. Over the course of the day, I’ve been checking other people who come to mind to make sure that I didn’t accidentally unfollow anyone that springs to mind, and have only found a couple that I’ve refollowed (then sent a DM to, to explain and to reconnect). I’m sure there are others, so I’ll do this a few more times … tweets to ask people to connect with me if I’m not following them back, and thinking of people on my own to double check.
After all of this, I’m down to following 837 people. It’s far from my ideal of 200 or so, but given how many people I follow that I know in real life, I just can’t get down to an ideally small list anymore. Today, I’ve been able to keep up with conversations, and actually read the content from the people I follow, in little bits of time here and there. I’m still going to miss things, but it’s way better than it was with over 2,000 people to try to get to know and keep up with.
Step Six: Maintain the signal-to-noise ratio
To try to keep the signal strong, I’m going to add new people that I follow back to a list, so that I can keep an eye on them for awhile and see who I build relationships with, and who I don’t. If I don’t have conversations, and don’t start to build a relationship after a few weeks, and ultimately, find their content to be more noise than signal, I’ll unfollow.
Yes, it takes time. But, with all the good that Twitter has brought to my life, it’s worth taking the time to keep the signal strong and the noise down.
What are YOUR strategies for increasing Twitter’s signal-to-noise ratio?
Filed under: Social Media, Social Media, Twitter
