If you’re not familiar with Twitter, watch this explanatory video, and then learn how it applies to your blog in two great posts called “9 Benefits of Twitter for Bloggers” and “A Quick Introduction to Twitter for Bloggers“.

photo credit: luc legay

Having been on Twitter for a while, I find that a dozen or so new people follow me every day. To be honest, I’m not sure why they follow me (I’m only moderately interesting and tend to talk about work too much), but still, they do, so I’ve had to decide what to do about it.

When people follow me, I like to take a moment and view their profile, and decide if I’d like to follow them as well. I have a pretty open attitude towards following people; if they’re interesting, I’ll follow. I use tweetdeck to organize people of particular interest into groups so I don’t get overwhelmed with general chatter, and then rely on serendipity for the rest.

The time management pit of managing Twitter followers

The haphazard nature of new followers makes it easy to waste a lot of time. If I checked out a profile every time I got a new follow notice, I’d never get anything else done—because if I’m being haphazard about it, I don’t just look at the profile… I also click links, follow @replies, and generally wander (delightfully but aimlessly).

I’m a big fan of Tim Ferriss’s obsession with batching regular tasks, so that’s an obvious first step. Instead of jumping off track with every new follower, I let the notifications gather and go through them once every few days or so.

My tools and tactics for evaluating Twitter followers

From here on, this post is going to talk about specific technologies and tools that I use. They’re certainly not the only ones available; they just happen to be the ones I’ve picked.

I’m admittedly a hopeless optimizer; if you have less Twitter activity, more time, or more sanity than I do, this may be overkill for you. I encourage you to look through my list and play with the ideas that appeal to you, and not worry about the rest.

Getting to the essential information

With my Twitter notification settings, I get several types of notices:

• Email copies of direct messages sent to me through Twitter
• Notifications that I’m being followed (by someone I’m already following)
• Notifications that I’m being followed (by someone I’m not following)

I like to glance through the first two types for general info, but only the last group is relevant to the process of evaluating new followers for potential follow-back.

Sorting through email messages is not a good use of time, so I started using filters in Gmail to help with this some time ago. I noticed that only the third group of messages use the phrase “you may follow” (encouraging me to check out their profile), so I easily set up a rule to “mark as read” any message from Twitter that doesn’t say “you may follow”.

That was a good first step. In conjunction with a filter that routed all mail from Twitter to its own folder/label for easy batching, I could tell at a glance what kind of message it was.

Breaking free of email

When it comes down to it, though, email is not really a good tool for this process. The emails themselves don’t contain enough information to make a decision (except in cases where I happen to recognize a name)—it’s the link to the profile that I want, and clicking through dozens of emails just to click one link each is not very efficient. But what would be a better tool?

There are probably other tools that would work, but RSS is the one that comes to mind for me. With an RSS feed, I can very quickly scroll through an expanded list, ctrl-click the links to open them in new tabs, and be on my way.

The only trouble with this idea is that (to my knowledge) there is no RSS feed of recent followers. Enter MailBucket, a tool that takes email and turns it into an RSS feed on the fly.

With MailBucket, all I have to do is edit my Gmail filter to send “you may follow” messages from Twitter to my MailBucket email address, and then subscribe to the resulting feed in Google Reader. If you don’t actually use an RSS reader, you could even take it a step further and run the feed through FeedBurner, subscribe via email, and get one “daily digest” of all new follows.

Edit: The MailBucket feed doesn’t make the profile URLs clickable, so I’ve done a little magic with Yahoo! Pipes to remedy that. The specifics are probably beyond the interest of most readers, so I’m leaving them out, but if you really want to know how I did it, leave a comment and I’ll post more info.

See follower quality at a glance

With a lot of followers comes a lot of cruft. Having specific standards helps weed out the worst. I generally won’t follow those who:

• Only tweet with links to their own posts (if I wanted to subscribe to your blog, I would)
• Don’t ever @reply to anyone (it’s not very interesting to listen to someone who’s talking into a vacuum)
• Don’t have any tweets at all (do you understand the premise of Twitter?)
• Follow way more people than follow them (this seems spammy, or at the least, desperate)

Obviously some of these are very subjective, so they’re just general guidelines. You’ve basically got eight or nine tweets to catch my eye (that’s how many show up in my first screenful).

For the last item on the list, I also use a cool little Greasemonkey script called Twitter User Classify that visually shows me the user’s ratio of “following” to “followers”. (Like all Greasemonkey scripts, it’s only for Firefox, but that’s my primary browser so it works well for me.) The ratio is not the be-all-end-all, but it’s a helpful clue.

When to un-follow?

Honestly, I hardly ever un-follow people unless they’re downright annoying (sending inappropriate direct messages or other forms of spam).

A lot of the interest factor of Twitter is in wandering into conversations that I would never otherwise encounter. Being fairly entrpreneurial, I like to “cross-pollinate” with industries outside my own and see what I can learn and apply to my own projects. Following a lot of diverse people is surprisingly useful to that end.

How do you manage your Twitter account?

I’d love to hear how you handle the info-challenges of Twitter. Leave comments or post on your own blog, and by all means, if you have any questions (about specific tools, my philosophy, whatever), leave those, too.

And follow me on Twitter.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 6th, 2008 at 9:45 am by Sarah Lewis and is filed under Twitter. It's also tagged applicability, batching, follower, followers, general chatter, notifications, obsession, open attitude, optimizer, sanity, serendipity, specific technologies, tim ferriss, time management, Twitter. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.