How To Vastly Improve Your Twitter Stream
My Twitter stream had become a little jaded. It was full of people I no longer interact with (they don’t tweet or are too noisy or they no longer tweet stuff relevant to me etc) or people that have just left the service and I wanted to get some more relevant people to follow. At the end of the day I use Twitter to access information and it makes me more knowledgeable about what is going on in the areas that I work in and enjoy socially. I need that stream to be as strong and as relevant to me as possible but to be honest I have neglected it recently largely because it is a time consuming job thanks to Twitter’s own useless way of allowing you to manage your followers meaning that you have to scroll through hundreds of pages to find people you followed a year ago. Since I have taken the time to make the changes and remove the useless stuff and add good quality people to follow I have noticed a massive difference in the quality of links I am getting. It takes time to add the right people and it is something that should be done on an ongoing basis but it is something that is well worth doing…
Getting Rid Of The Rubbish
There are a couple of tools that will help you including UnTweeps but I have to say that this new tool called Manage Twitter is by far the best I have come across and using their simple interface you will be able to remove people who don’t follow you back, people you have no interaction with and people who have not tweeted in over a month. Within 2 minutes I was able to lose 50 people from my stream who were adding no real value.
Finding New People
I spent about an hour adding 50 new people to my stream and it has already dramatically improved how I use Twitter to digest information. The time I have to use Twitter during the day is very limited so rather than having a thousand people that I don’t have time to interact with and talk to I am trying to keep my stream at the 300 mark so as I have real top quality information that I can read when I do have the time to use Twitter. There are a million ways to find new people to follow but here are the ways I find most effective…
Find The People You Respect And Follow People They Follow
Piggyback on other people’s hard work. I often go in and see who the people I respect and admire are following. Chances are if they have taken the time to follow them and think what they have to say is worth listening to then you are on to something. Not all of the people they follow will be relevant but you will find some real gems in there.
Use Twitter Lists
Twitter lists have largely been unused by the vast majority of users and they do have a lot of detractors but there are also some great lists out there that people have taken time to build and curate and they are essentially doing all the hard work for you if you want to find the relevant people within certain niches and they cut out a lot of the hard manual work of searching for people. You’ll find loads of these and people like Scoble have taken the time to do some amazing work on tech lists.
Sugested User List
Twitter has had a lot of criticism for their suggested user list in the past but they have actually improved it vastly with different categories and it is a good way of finding more popular accounts like news organisations, celebrities and sports stars.
Find Your Real Friends
You get prompted at the very start to invite all your friends to use Twitter with you but when I did this at the very start there was nobody I actually knew on there so it was a little bit useless. I recently went back to try this out and was surprised when there were a load of new friends in there who had since signed up to the service. Head back in there and you will be surprised at who you find.
Blog Posts
If you are looking for anything from musicians to sports stars the chances are that somebody will have taken the time to group them in to a handy list on a blog post. You should be able to find a listing of people in your own niche by doing a simple search on Google. Here are examples of Bollywood actors, Premier league footballers, Models and Scientists. Basically if there is a list of people on Twitter that you want to find the chances are you will find it on a blog somewhere.
Listing Websites
There are tons of Twitter listings and directories out there that you can use people that have added themselves including Wefollow and Justtweetit. Many different countries will have a local Twitter listing so again do a Google search and you’ll be able to find people in your local area.
Hard Manual Work
No matter how many services there are out there I still find that the best follows I find are the people I pick up randomly along the way. This does take a lot of hard work and I will often see great Tweets or people to follow but I completely forget to add them. Building up your stream is hard work but the more effort you put in to it the better results you are going to get in return.
It’s Hard Work But Worth It
Building up a good Twitter stream is hard work (I sometimes wish they sold nice tailored solutions on Tweetdeck) and Twitter themselves have a very poor system for managing all the people you follow. Luckily with the tools in this list you should be able to build up your stream and get the best information and as much of it as you can actually manage to process in the time you have. As you can see from the answers below most people just find people to follow through other people they know and that is largely what I had been doing for a while but I can see how taking a couple of hours to pro-actively clean up your Twitter stream and get the best people in there actually helps in the long run, you should do the same too.
I Asked People On Twitter How They Found People To Follow?
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