As I said in the comments of the original econsultancy post, determining whether or not they’ve done the best thing depends on what they want to get out of the service: I’ve not used lists at all, so hadn’t realised it might be a way round the issue – maybe I’ll give it a try. Because even without automatic following, and regular attempts at spring-cleaning, I still can’t seem to get my list down.

The way you write about this and the way e-consultancy apparently looks at it also is that you have to look at your timeline to follow those you ‘follow’. I don’t do that anymore, I hardly ever look at my timeline to be honest. And I follow the content of many more people than the ones I actually follow. Sounds a bit weird, I know, but its actually pretty simple. Applications like Tweetdeck make it possible for me to follow a topic or follow a specific group of people (lists). That way it hardly matters if I ‘follow’ anyone on Twitter or not, they show up in my apps anyway if they have anything interesting to say.

Those who I really want to keep track of, regardless of what they are saying I make lists or groups in Tweetdeck so I can easily find back what they have been saying.

In my opinion followers will become more ‘friends’ and people will follow the content rather than the persons. That way you don’t have a timeline which is ‘noisy’.

Hope it makes sense what I’m trying to say

Anyone I follow I’ve followed because I want to, or they’ve followed me and I thought they sounded interesting but I do tend to have a weekly clear out and I use Twitblock to weed out any crap that follows me. I don’t care if people don’t follow me back but I do still use Twitdiff to monitor those that follow/unfollow and if someone unfollows that didn’t provide any value, then I’ll likely unfollow them on principle.

Great analysis of our own situation and I think you’ve summed up why it is impossible to sensibly follow thousands of people. I personally follow around 650 and that’s pretty much the maximum, as far as I can tell. Your idea of building lists, rather than following people, is a good one. I’ll give it some thought, though I’d hate to backtrack again as far as @econsultancy goes!

My idea was simply to reset the @econsultancy account to zero and then follow people we know and trust. You can’t ‘know’ 19,000 people in any meaningful sense. But you can know people who write for us, who help us with our training, who speak at our events, and who we’ve worked with in the past decade or so, and who we work with today.

In any case, ‘not following’ doesn’t mean ‘definitely not interacting’, in the same way that ‘following’ doesn’t mean ‘definitely interacting’! We continue to monitor what’s being said about us and wade in from time to time, especially when questions are asked.

To be clear, while Twitter hasn’t made a massive impression on our revenue, it has definitely helped us grow awareness and finesse the kind of content we produce. It’s not about linkbait per se, but I know that certain types of post / headline will work better than others, and it has been interesting to learn from that. Moreover, we’ve enjoyed the feedback we receive on Twitter, whether good or bad. I think all of these things help us improve what we do, but it’s important to remember that we’re still learning and observing as we go along…!

Cheers,

c.

I am also nearing that point as there are ‘experts’ I wish to follow in varying fields, the general industry chit chat which is fun and great learning and then the fact that I want to leave open channels for people to reach out if they want to.
I have to admit, I do get a little ego-glow if someone I respect follows me back but I agree, we should be using ‘customer segmentation’ to manage our twitter channels.

Nice Post!

Nikki Rae

Suppose i’m just a bit old school in some ways, and if people follow you genuinely expect them to make contact and say hi. Avoid the follow unfollow game. As you say, no rules, just reach out and make contact and find your own place in the twitterverse

p.s I have edited and added your twitter profile (assuming you were too lazy to if you were one a phone let me know if you want to swop it for another link.)