Yet another Twitter post: How to extract signal from the noise.
I frequently come across developers that scoff at Twitter as a waste of time and a cesspool where productivity goes to die amongst the social media “experts.” Yes, it is definitely those things, but it doesn’t have to be. Here is how I use Twitter to maximize its professional value.
Unfollow/don’t follow people whose tweets bother you.
The great thing about Twitter is that relationships are one-way. You’re in total control of what content you subject yourself to. You should never feel obligated to follow someone that follows you or is notorious.
When I look at someone’s profile trying to decide if I should follow them I look for a few things:
- Mostly original content. Frequent retweeters that don’t add value or insight are out. If I see more than ~25% of your recent tweets are retweets, I’m likely to skip following.
- Content relevant to my profession. If you are using Twitter as a platform for your political/religious/other viewpoints, I’m probably going to pass. I’ve got my views, you’ve got yours and we’re probably not going to change each other’s minds so lets just stay away from it.
- Using Twitter where Facebook would be better suited. Related to #2, if you’re using Twitter to give me the blow by blow of your day and I don’t know you personally, you’re not providing much value to me. Facebook is great for this kind of stuff and if you want to know more intimate details of my life (and you don’t, trust me), add me as a friend there. Twitter isn’t the ‘what’, it’s the ‘why’.
- People who prefix replies. This is particularly a problem in the .NET community. I understand people are disappointed Twitter removed the option to view all replies but prefixing only makes the issue worse. I can’t click on a link to the replied-to Tweet to follow the conversation so now you’re just cluttering my stream with portions of a conversation I can’t expose the rest of. I’m probably the most lenient with this rule especially with more prominent people.
Put the tools to work.
Once you start following a lot of people, the web interface and simple clients like Twhirl, Witty, etc. just don’t scale to handle the workload. I needed a way to extract the most relevant tweets from the people I follow. In the latest version of TweetDeck they added groups that you can sync with the iPhone version. This makes a huge difference.
From the people I follow, I’ve selected a subset of them to be included in my main reading list. This list contains the people I follow who consistently tweet high-quality content. I read it frequently throughout the day. When I have a little more time to browse, I scroll over to the ‘Everyone’ list and see what else is going on. As I start to recognize consistently high-quality tweets in the Everyone list, I move them over to the main list. This lets me loosen up a bit on my rules for following AND follow conversations. It’s sort of a compromise between viewing all replies and viewing just those to people I follow.
Best of all, TweetDeck syncs the groups to my iPhone so I get the same reading experience on my two primary devices. TweetDeck has a lot of deficiencies and UI quirks, but the sync’d group settings are such a killer feature that I’m willing to deal with those issues.
I never used to think I’d be able to follow more than 30 people and get any value out of Twitter but the combination of a well-curated follower list and the proper tools I’ve been able to ramp up the number of people I follow while maintaining a good signal-to-noise ratio without any additional time commitment.