I constantly complain about how difficult it is to keep my twitter stream at a good signal to noise ratio. For those of you who also run into this problem, I suggest checking out Contaxio. It’s a great tool and in about five minutes I was able to easily trim about 20% of the people I follow, but closer to 50% of the tweets (I would guess). I still don’t have anyway to block foursquare updates, but it’s a step in the right direction.
Something I’ve noticed recently is that some days I don’t have time to check Twitter at all. I feel a little out of the loop, because often these are the same days that I don’t really check out any news at all. If I do, it’s really late at night and only briefly. I always wonder if I missed something. I pride myself on being up to date on the world around me.
Enter the web service News.me. It’s really basic, but really useful. You sign up and add your Twitter account. News.me then calculates the five most popular stories linked to by the people you follow on Twitter. Simple, easy and useful. I don’t check the e-mails every day, instead I only look at them a few times a week.
Check out News.me here.
I assumed people just created bots and then pointed them towards a specific account. It turns out that there is a service that you allow to use your account to randomly follow people. It then checks to make sure the people you randomly follow continue to follow you back, otherwise it unfollows them. It does this whole thing automatically. Twitter only allows you to follow about 2,000 people before you it the cap. The cap isn’t removed until you have over 2,000 followers yourself. This is why you see so many accounts that are following that many people, but have so few followers themselves.
It’s a good way to game the system, and over time it works. People think they will have more credibility if they have more followers, but that isn’t actually the case. How likely is someone to actually read your tweet if they are following several thousand people? Not very. This is why services like Klout, which measures online influence, are increasingly relying on the ratio of followed to followers. Something to keep in mind when someone is claiming to be a thought leader because of the large following they have.
Every few weeks I like to re-evaluate who I am following on Twitter. The idea is that my attention is limited, I want to be constantly adjusting the signal to noise ratio of my Twitter feed. The easiest way to eliminate people is just un-follow them when I see them tweet ten times in a row. For other people I just take away their retweets. Other ways to manage the stream are less obvious.
I usually use Friend or Follow or a similar service to establish who is still following me. Some of the people I follow are in this grey area where the content the put out isn’t great, but I feel some sort of social obligation to continue to follow them. A simple check of who isn’t following me is a quick way to justify dropping these people.
The final way I would like to further hone the feed doesn’t exist, but it should. I would like to see someone build a third party app on the Twitter API that sorts my followers my more complex methods. The one I would use specifically would be something like sort by “tweets per day over last 30 days.” See all of the people I follow sorted in this fashion would be a great way to quickly evaluate which ones to drop and which ones to continue to follow.
On this note there is definitely a future need for automated curation here. There needs to be some way to tell Twitter to selectively filter out tweets from my own followers on certain subjects. For instance there are a lot of sporting events I don’t really care about. On Saturday my feed is cluttered with people talking about College Football games. All those people who watching shows like American Idol? I could definitely go without those. At this point I tollerate it and continue to follow these people, but if there was a way to further tweak the signal to noise like this I would be a huge fan.
The good thing about not remembering something accurately is that sometimes you tweeted about it fourteen months ago and can go back and find the details.
The entries with blue text are from me, the entries with pink text are Cole.
I’m pretty sure at some point in Spring 2009 I enjoyed a delicious, free burrito.
Manage Twitter is a really cool web site that allows you to figure out which of your followers aren’t following you back. It’s really simple, but is probably going to get shut down soon. I recommend checking it out.
Ben Still has done a bunch of videos recently to promote his entrance into social media. Somehow I always come across them and somehow I don’t ever think they are funny, except for this time. In his latest video, Ben Stiller leaves a writers meeting discussing next tweet to meet with Ryan Seacrest.
This experiment has been going around today. The author explains how he used split testing to figure out if he phrased a question differently would he get better results. He shows the transition through the different phrases and the subsequent click through rate.
There is some obvious criticism of his experiment that can be read in the long thread of comments at the bottom of his page.
As a result I’ve made some small tweaks to this site. I’m interested to see if I can get some more followers on twitter this way.
Disclaimer: I have recently gone back to following 98% of those who follow me.
Anyone who has spent any amount of time using Twitter wants to get more followers. Some people dream of making it to 100 followers, some dream of 1,000, others still dream of even more. Everyone has different ideas about how to increase the amount of followers they have. I had a few of my own ideas so I decided to put them to the test.
I noticed that for the most part the people with a large amount of followers also had an equal or even greater number of friends. The amount of people who had thousands of followers and only a handful of people they followed were limited to celebrity personalities.
The first thing I wanted to figure out what would happen if I started following everyone possible. I didn’t discriminate at all about who I followed. I followed everyone possible. I went from following about 125 people to following over 500. This is evident in the graph below. The giant spike in followers correlates to the same time as the tremendous increase in the amount of people I was following.
This didn’t really surprise me all that much. It was consistent in what I thought would happen. What I wasn’t sure about is what happens when you stop following most of the people on your list. I knew that there would be a decrease. The question was how much of a decrease I would see.
When trying to guess how many people would stop following me as a result of me no longer following them I had one central question in my mind. Would they even notice? Apparently the answer was yes. My followers peaked at 351 and two weeks later it has dropped to 258, a drop of about 100 total followers. They noticed, but didn’t exactly notice overnight. It was a steady decline over time.
One final thing I was curious to find out about was how much of a bump in followers being re-tweeted would give me. A few days ago I tweeted something about a Calvin and Hobbes comic. Much to my enjoyment it was re-tweeted several times. All of the people who re-tweeted my tweet had a total of about 4,000 followers. There was no way to figure out the overlap, and there must have been at least some. However, despite @kylelibra being mentioned to several thousand people, there was absolutely no noticeable increase in followers. If I had to guess I would say that this is because everyone who checked out my profile noticed that I didn’t return people’s follows. Interesting to note, but by no way was there any scientific backing to this.
I’ve reached one main conclusion: if you want to have a lot of followers, you need to follow those who follow you. There are a lot of different views on following etiquette to consider.
Like this article? Check me out on Twitter @kylelibra, I follow everyone who follows me. (I’ve learned my lesson)
Recently I signed up for Twitter at the urging of a colleague. After figuring out what it was all about, I found that I really liked it. Unfortunately it took a little nudging to get me fully understand what was going on.
This is a very short explanation of Twitter:
Think of facebook status updates, but 140 max characters and more frequent. You subscribe to friend’s tweets (the name for the updates) and in turn they subscribe to yours. You can get all of the updates through your phone, but it is turned off by default. You can send tweets (updates) from your phone or from a computer. You don’t type out every literal thing you do all day long. Instead you only put something interesting, funny or important.
Interesting – “I just missed Jared at subway today.” (true, but a story for another day)
Funny – “pandemic has shut down the office.” (everyone got obsessed with the flash game)
Important – “drinking at McCarthys.” (that way friends can meet up with you)
It helps you kill time and keep up with what your friends are doing. Wired has a great article on making tweets interesting that everyone should read, you can check it out here. At the very least I recommend trying it for a week and seeing if you like it.
Below is some sample tweets from my feed today:
hamby86 – this is creepy about 3 hours ago
vebah – rediscovering twitter… thanks for another distraction libra about 8 hours ago
stevebanfield – good to see my LA twitter contacts posting. just seeing the tweets lets me know they are ok. up here in san mateo didn’t feel a thing about 8 hours ago
stevebanfield – CNN’s update on quake http://snurl.com/378bo about 8 hours ago
cld77 – I miss my own bed about 9 hours ago