Jimmy Gilmore

So you have already drunk the Twit­ter Koolaide. You’ve been tweet­ing awhile and now you have a few hun­dred fol­low­ers and are fol­low­ing more peo­ple than you can keep track of using Twitter.com on your browser. And you’re begin­ning to feel that you’re prob­a­bly not get­ting all that you could out of your Twit­ter expe­ri­ence because of an infor­ma­tion noz­zle that is blast­ing so hard you’ve lost con­trol of what you’re reading.

Now you’re won­der­ing, “do I need to unfol­low a hun­dred peo­ple because I’m not too inter­ested in every­thing they’re tweet­ing?” They all seemed so inter­est­ing at first but now — not so much. Will they unfol­low me if I unfol­low them? Prob­a­bly. And that may be OK. But if you self­ishly want to hang on to them and not hurt anyone’s feel­ings, there’s a solution.

Thank­fully, twit­ter now has a built in tool to help this prob­lem: Twit­ter Lists. Lists allow you to group your favorite Tweet­ers into a sin­gle browser win­dow. You can even cre­ate groups for spe­cific top­ics. So if you’re inter­ested in learn­ing about a par­tic­u­lar news story, click the “news” list you cre­ated of pun­dits or jour­nal­ists. Or if maket­ing is your bag, cre­ate one of mar­ket­ing pro­fes­sion­als you respect.

You can also look at other people’s lists and get a feel if your miss­ing something.

If you use a tool like Hoot­suite, Tweet­deck, or Seesmic these lists can be inte­grated into your desk­top tool or iPhone app. (CoTweet is also an excel­lent tool but focused on enter­prise users. If that’s you, I highly rec­om­mend it.)

If you use Seesmic of Tweet­deck (Hoot­suite is phas­ing out groups and wants you to use Twitter’s lists) you can use groups to cre­ate columns to eas­ily scan and not have them part of your actual Twit­ter account. I find Tweet­decks func­tion to be easy to use. And since I man­age three accounts, ease of use is extremely impor­tant to me.

These tools should help you make more sense out of Twit­ter stream with a bit of time spent get­ting caught up sort­ing. I’m con­stantly tweak­ing my Tweet­deck groups to try and make sure I have the best infor­ma­tion stream possible.

One prob­lem lists doesn’t solve is the DM conun­drum. I find that I’m con­sis­tently auto DM’d so I tend not to pay much atten­tion to what’s in my DM inbox. I could just unfol­low any­one that does that but I’m con­scious that some peo­ple don’t know they’re being annoy­ing by send­ing auto­mated mes­sages, so I’m giv­ing every­one the ben­e­fit of doubt.

The things that will get peo­ple unfol­lowed by me is spam­ming me with porn or oth­er­wise offen­sive stuff and auto blast­ing me with 10 tweets at a time in attempt to cap­i­tal­ize my stream. I’d rather tweet­ers be inter­est­ing than annoying.

Hope these tips help. If any­one has any to add please add to comments.