Tweep Sweep

Twitter was starting to become overwhelming, even with organizational tools like TweetDeck to sort friends and followers into groups and to filter tweets. I’ve been on the system since June 2007 and welcomed all followers for months. Earlier this year I made a concerted effort to engage with followers more effectively and to seek out scientific people on twitter.

After posting a list of 100 science types I was friends with on twitter (i.e. people whom I follow and who follow me back) my follower number doubled from a few hundred to well over 1400. Concomitantly, I was following back a lot of those people and that number was close to that number by the beginning of this week.

That’s a lot of tweets, quite a few spammy comments and far too many news bots, irrelevant organisations, and search engine marketing “gurus” with whom I was spending an awful lot of online time.

So, I turned to FriendorFollow.com. Enter your twitter username and it returns an array of photo icons, or avatars, of all the people you follow, and all those who follow you. It also lets you know who follows you that you aren’t following and vice versa. It’s this latter category that is perhaps the most interesting – those people who you follow, but who aren’t following you back on twitter. Of course, I’m very happy for you to follow me

FriendorFollow is not 100% reliable in its reporting (thanks StandingFirmCM for reinforcing my thoughts on that), so you have to double check on twitter itself. If you cannot “direct message” (DM) someone from your twitter sidebar then you know for sure that they are not following you.

Now, there are reasons to follow someone regardless of whether they follow you back, indeed, I hopefully provide a useful service on twitter. There may also be genuine gurus, useful news sources, or people whose tweets are interesting in myriad ways. But then there are those people you follow with whom you never engage and no longer fall into those categories.

For the useful news type tweeters and organizations, I’ve either subscribed to their web site RSS feed in Google Reader or I’ve subscribed to their twitter RSS feed and unfollowed them. That way, they no longer clutter up my timeline with headlines, but all their content is still at my fingertips and searchable within Google Reader.

For the self-proclaimed gurus, I’ve unfollowed a few of the more verbose or irrelevant among that number, although I’m still hanging on to every tweet of the true gurus.

I tweeted about this action plan, in the usual terse and succinct twitter style, which requires a maximum of 140 characters and it produced a lot of responses from followers and non-followers alike. Some were scared that I’d unfollow them and wanted to make sure we stayed connected. No worries there, I have unfollowed dozens of tweeps this week, but none of them are people who are following me.

@ruthseeley suggested that, “The people you follow don’t have to be the ones who follow you – they only need to be adding value to your work/life.” It’s a fair comment, but like I say the people who are adding value are still on my list.

It’s funny there were more responses on my FriendFeed thread than on twitter. Publicising the sweep wasn’t chastisement (Kambiz), really it was just a throwaway comment.

However, after I tweeted it, it did occur to me that I wanted to discuss FriendorFollow on Sciencetext.com and provide some twitter tips and insights to those people not fully up to speed on some of the issues.

Social Media is not a numbers game, as I’ve said before, it’s about engaging with people, which is more often than not a two-way process. So, the tweep sweep exercise is well worth it as it allows you to take back some control of your feeds and timelines by removing those that are no longer of interest.

There is no obligation to follow anyone and no obligation for anyone to follow you. This was not a tit-for-tat exercise, I’m not 13, it was a spring cleaning process that has opened up more space in my “inbox” allowing me to engage more lucidly with people with whom I have mutual interests on social media networks.