Many people have asked me how you can become or stay a Social User on Twitter without loosing manageability of the Home feed. Happy to help, and instead of explaining a few more times - it is time to write a blog post...
The 'trick' to manage over 20k followers is ... Twitter's List tool. Lists allow you to group Twitter users, which you don't even have to follow, in a list. Users can decided if they want to make their list public or keep it private. For me I decided to keep them private (you will see later) - others are of great value to be public (e.g. thanks for SAP CDO Jonathan Becher to maintain a list of all SAP employees on Twitter (see here).
For me the List is a private tool to keep topics and Twitter users separate from each other, and to stay on top of the tweets of the Twitter users I really want to see the tweets from. I regularly review my Lists in regards of keeping them lean in terms of tweets collected in them - but which users I put on which list is my personal and private decision. Other Twitter users may see that differently.
So what Twitter Lists do I maintain?
- ReadFirst - This is practically my Home Feed replacement. It is about 500 Twitter users whose tweets I care about. I can't check it all in its entirety - but check it multiple times a day.
- Future of Work / NextGen Apps - Well you can guess what these lists are about - all the key people by research area. Many Twitter Users are double listed between ReadFirst and these - so I can look at lists by topic.
- Vendors - Pretty much Twitter user from a vendor is in here... the List has pretty much lost value as it is in multiple 1000s - but I have a dream for it... see below. Just need Twitter to build it.
- Media - These are journalists whose publications I don't want to miss, many of them I work with on understanding technology events and developments.
- PR Pros - The 'dark' side of the analyst role, but an important role to get the word out.
- News in different categories - E.g. when I want to see what is going on in Technology, general news, in Germany and Italy. Instead of having to scroll back in a combined List of all news to catch the early AM European publications - I keep them separate.
- Beach Volleyball - For fun, remember you can Twitter users on lists and don't have to follow them...
What's the problem with the approach of using Lists?
- Habit Change - Probably the hardest, I started out with Lists right away - mostly out of curiosity - but once I had a few hundred followers, that was my tool of choice.
- Horrible List Support in Twitter - Twitter has many areas that have massive room for improvement - e.g. consistent UIs across platforms. But lists are particularly bad. Not even alphabetically sorted on some devices (but newest on top), on mobile devices you can't assign two lists in one run etc. - and more that will be another blog post.
- Maintenance - You have to go back and maintain the list... a Twitter user may have gone passive, change topic, may not be worth your time. No need to unfollow - just take the user off the list - or move to another one...
Now I have a complete wish list of new List features... if anyone at Twitter is reading this...
MyPOV
Twitter is a null-sum game in regards of follow / followers. With Twitter imposing gates for further usage (a user cannot follow more people until the user's followers have caught up) - the Twitter Universe gets unbalanced by the 'Hoarders', the 'Spammers' make money from balancing the whole thing a bit. But for me it is simple: If a user is social (that is a user who tweets), has a profile picture and some sort of byline (sorry I don't follow eggs, it shows a lack of interest in the medium), is not a spammer, does not tweet offensive content and tweets in language I understand (apologies to all Arabic, Chinese and other followers) - I will follow you back. Even when it is puppy pictures. They just don't make it to my ReadFirst List. But they are so cute...
What is your approach on Twitter? Look forward to hear from you...
