I used to follow you.
If we met at a cocktail reception and I thought we clicked, I followed you. If we sat next to each other at a conference, or if you were a panelist on stage, I followed you. If someone I previously followed retweeted you a lot, I followed you. If I subscribed to your blog or liked your Facebook updates, I followed you on Twitter, too.
Over time, your updates–however insightful, meaningless, or sublime–melded with other people’s updates until I saw dozens, hundreds, thousands in a given hour and I lost track. By increasing the multitude of people and organizations I opted to follow on Twitter, you shifted from a name to a number to a lost tweet.
You don’t deserve to be lost. You don’t deserve to be one of many. After a lengthy telephone conversation the other day with Sid Burgess–spawned from numerous blog posts I’d previously read about the new Twitter List feature–I decided to prune everyone I followed.
I’m still following you but my Twitter name may not appear in the sea of names who follow you.
Confused?
Here’s a list of tweets from marketing and communications professionals I am following on Twitter:
Despite following 94 names in the /ariherzog/comm list (which you can follow, too, by clicking the above image and then the appropriate link there), my name will only appear in the “followers” list of some 12 or 13 users, such as Dirk Singer, Thierry de Baillon, Des Walsh, Rachel Kay, and Lawrence Liu.
In other words, while I’m following 94 names on a manually-created targeted list, I’m only seeing about a dozen of those names in my real-time updated stream. The rest I need to click a link on twitter.com to see.
Twitter Lists, therefore, improve my user experience and make my online time more productive. Sid wanted Twitter to be less about following conversations and more about enhancing his daily life. By following less people in the stream and more people in lists, I am slowly perceiving Twitter less as a distraction and using it more as the tool it was built to be.
Related posts:
- Top 3 Twitter Users to Follow Today
- How Unfollowing May Increase Twitter Productivity
- How Readtwit Improves Twitter Productivity
Comments:
Ari Herzog is an online media strategist and Newburyport City Councilor-Elect.
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{ 10 comments… read them below or add one }
I couldn’t have said it better myself.
Best of luck on your newest venture and journey down Twitter lane.
Twitter Lists are amazing, I have several twitter accounts and the larger ones definitely need to be organized.
It’s been interesting seeing your Twitter follow strategies evolve the last few months. I’m curious though, what are you trying to optimize? The information to “noise” ratio?
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You caught me off-guard with optimization. Not organization? I’m trying to organize why I use Twitter, to return to my roots, the good old days, when I followed people and organizations to learn from–long before there were third-party apps and celebrities and millions of users.
Twitter has become very noisy, yes; but moreover, I’d followed folks for what I thought were the right reasons. I followed you, initially, Jesse, for instance, because we blipped music together. Is that a reason to follow someone from blip.fm to twitter.com? Perhaps, but a silly reason now that I look back.
The introduction of Twitter lists should clearly help users organize their group of followers. Using Hootsuite to manage my regular Twitter use has enabled me to group followers into useful themes, but the utility is limited since I cannot browse followers/people that I am following without logging on to Twitter itself.
Great follow up on the use of “optimize.” Re-centering on the reason for the use of Twitter is a good idea – connecting with people.
You have been my fan ever since you revamped your Twitter relationships. I have yet to engage in Twitter lists. Thanks for the useful information. One of my problems is that I spend all of my available time on writing regular quality blog posts, and not on developing relationships on Twitter. Is it worth the effort? Is is robbing Peter to pay Paul?
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Ask your 867 Twitter followers if they’d like you to engage with them.
I didnt immediately see the point in twitter lists….after all there are web directories of people using twitter, aren’t there? how wrong I was! They’re so much more immediately useful and it’s a lot easier to connect with relevant people.
Incidentally I’m liking the new beta retweet feature that’s doing the rounds on some accounts… could develop into quite a handy tool.
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List are useful for sorting your favorite tweets at one place, if you like to read some one’s tweets but you dont have time to read it by visiting their profile. but using twitter list you can add your favorite twitter profiles at one place
Do you know, if you have a Twitter account, for example, dedicated to gardening enthusiasts, then you may want to open Lists called “roses” and “tulips” and “perennials”. Then, tweet about your specialized Lists to encourage your followers to join the List of their greatest interest. In this way you will automatically be categorizing your followers
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