Last week I wrote a blog post about What Your Social Media Profile Says About You. I added in a section from Lisa Jones asking “Are you a social media floosy?”
Lisa is not one of those social media types who advocates mass following – she shows people how to build relevant communities that you can talk to and more importantly listen to. As promised in the previous post this is Lisa’s follow up blog on how to keep a handle on the numbers of people you follow on Twitter, so that you can get more value from it:
- Study and reduce your followers by using sites like Socialbro.com (see screenshot at the top of this post)- I totally love this website. It helps me study my followers (and also those of my clients/competitors) and helps me to manage them (follow/unfollow) on the fly.
- Twitter lists – create lists of people you want to mix with – this can really reduce noise and help you zone in on conversations. You can create lists by clicking onto your Name at the top of your Twitter screen, Lists appears down the left, then Create List on the right.
- Subscribing to Twitter lists is also a great strategy and does NOT affect your follower numbers – look for lists that others have created and subscribe to them. You can find lists by either looking at which ones you have been added to (again click onto your name, choose Lists down the left and look for Member of in your Lists column). If you are looking at someone else on Twitter, you’ll see their lists within their List menu.)
- Don’t be a ninny and follow people just because they follow you… it’s not sincere, it’s not really possible in reality and it’ll just make your world REALLY NOISY!
Clearly I would be giving bad advice if I did not warn you about the mass following / mass un-following penalties that Twitter mentions on its website (it’s worth checking these out and being aware). However, I recently dropped a lot of people I was following and I am still alive (cross fingers please).
Think carefully about your Twitter (and overall social media) strategy – what do you want to achieve? If raising your profile, generating leads, sourcing candidates and finding content is what you want, then being selective about how you spend your time on Twitter, who you follow and ensuring that you listen to what’s going on out there is key.
