Twitter is still growing rapidly with 9.4 million new users in January 2010 alone and more than 1 billion tweets per month. I'm approaching my first Twitter anniversary and by recently implementing a simple guideline for whom I follow, I've found that the tool has become much more useful. I know that many of our members are considering whether Twitter may actually have some value for their working lives, so I thought I would share a note on how I use the tool.
On a busy working day, the only 2 use cases for my usage of Twitter are:
- Follow interesting individuals and companies to easily stay up-to-date. I used to go through my RSS feeds at least daily, but now I do it only once or twice a week, as Twitter provides me with most of the information.
- Ask questions and get feedback from peers. Twitter works really well when I want some feedback, but don't want to send too many e-mails to my contacts. Since we are all flooded with e-mails, Twitter is a neat alternative, where everybody can easily decide whether they would like to reply to a question on Twitter or not.
I used to casually follow other Twitter users and back in August posted a listing of 10 online professionals to watch on Twitter in 2009. Since then I've implemented what I call a
Twitter quantity-rule: To reduce noise, I consequently unfollow users with more tweets than followers.
Silicon Valley tech blogger Louis Gray called this the Twitter Noise Ratio back in April 2008.
This means that I might lose out on contributions from some great minds that use Twitter like a fire-hose. I simply found that it drowned in noise and it was impossible to keep up with the folks I really wanted to keep up with. As a side effect, this means that today I am actually only following 2 of the 10 on my 6 months old list (@jdavidhobbs and @kasthomas. Sorry @jeanmariepascal, you have a nice tweet vs. follower ratio, but too many French tweets for my language skills!)
These days I rarely visit twitter.com, except to check the tweets vs. followers ratio for a given user. Instead I use TweetDeck to view and write tweets. TweetDeck makes re-tweeting easy and automatically shortens URL's to save characters. I also have a few search columns open, including one for fun to follow @ChuckNorriz.
Having read this far you might be thinking: How do I get more followers? Kas Thomas, analyst at CMS Watch, has described How do you get 10K Twitter-followers legitimately? My followers have arrived in a less systematic way, some tweets are popular and are commented on or re-tweeted, while others don't get any response. I try to include a Twitter hashtag when relevant and a @username when I want to highlight or thank somebody.
That's basically it. Twitter is many things to many people. Jed Cawthorne, Senior Specialist, Knowledge Management at Canadian Tire Corporation recently posted a good example of how Twitter can be very helpful at work. How do you use Twitter in a work context?
I’m mortified. Unfollowed like yesterday’s news.
But your rule is ridiculous ;-) If you were insane enough to follow it, I think the first thing you’d need to do is figure out a way to not count the @replies. Lots of people use Twitter to have one-on-one conversations. Most of these @replies do not appear in your Twitter stream so shouldn’t fire-hose you.
I guess I could write a script to erase history and delete my old tweets so it stays under my number of followers. It wouldn’t changing my fire-hose-tweeting patterns, but I could win back the love of my favourite Danish analyst.
Or is it just me? Does anyone else think that The Rule has any merit whatsoever? Apart from the fact that is mean Janus won’t be tweeting very much any more for fear of unfollowing himself ;-)
Last question – do you have a tool to monitor it? For example, if @d_ott tweeted and pushed him over the limit, how do you know?
Here is a crazy Alternative Rule that I use – unfollow people that annoy you.
Oh yes – another word of warning. For the love of all that his holy, do not follow Jed Cawthorne (@jedpc) on Twitter. He has THREE TIMES as many Tweets as followers. Three times! People have been shot for less. And he’s got the nerve to write an article on how Twitter can be helpful at work.
Or, follow my rule and follow @jedpc cause he rocks. I do.
Janus,
I thought you were all about people not making random arbitrary decisions. Don’t you normally criticise people who come up with arbitrary and random evaluation criteria?
What about the quality of what is being said rather than how many people are following? Otherwise we’ll all go off and follow the wisdom of Ashton Kutcher and Paris Hilton.
Philippe
It’s a strange sort of a robot that bases his twitter following rule on a mathematical equation?
Personally, I use twitter for (in no particular order):
a) ranting
b) moaning
c) being nosey
d) keeping up with like-minded #WCM enthusiasts
e) a little bit of occasional self-promotion
Sometimes people tweet en masse like @oscarberg but with tools like TweetDeck it’s easy to bypass stuff I don’t want to read. Some of it’s good
It’s called social networking and until it becomes part of my job role to contribute via twitter it will remain an enlightening insight into the minds of the industry and an entertaining overview of what people are up to in general
Besides if you unfollow those that tweet too much, what are you supposed to do on the train/toilet/takeaway and it’s [surely?] no big shame to miss a tweet every now and again if you get so many.
However, I do think that people use Twitter for their own purposes and we should not berate somebody who does not follow our own view on it (Perhaps some people only follow twitterers with beautiful faces in which case you two would be history)
I think you need to rethink your approach a bit. I tend to follow Jon’s rule and just unfollow people who annoy me. There are a lot of these so-called helpful metrics and algorithms out there to guide novices on how to decide who to follow and who not to follow, but most are pretty ridiculous. Let’s remember that Twitter is a “social” tool, and therefore should be grounded in some sense of human interaction. I don’t choose my friends in life based on how many friends they have, so why would I do it on Twitter? That may have been prevalent back in high school, but I like to think I’ve grown out that phase of my life. I follow a few folks who tend to tweet a lot (2 of them have already commented above), but I have no idea how many followers they have. If the content of their tweets strays and begins to annoy me, I’ll unfollow them. But until that time, I appreciate that they share as much as they do and I’ll continue to enjoy their posts.
The only metric I do tend to glance at is whether or not a person I’m about to follow follows many people him/herself. This let’s me know how engaged they tend to be. (if a person has a bunch of followers but tends not to follow others, then they likely have a marketing agenda. In those cases, I still may elect to follow them and give it a whirl. The stakes aren’t very high afterall…I can always just revert back to the Rule of Marks and unfollow them if they annoy me. ;-)
@sliewehr (follow me if you dare)
It seems that this strategy would lead to following a lot of celebrity name-claims. Here are a few accounts that pass the filter: @TheWho_, @kennyrogers1, @BarbraStreisand, @leonardNimoy…
Have to admit that I am stumped. What is that metric supposed to tell you about somebody? That they’re not popular enough for you to follow? That they tweet “too much”? In either case, the logic is flawed. It means that you would follow @marshallk (15,489:14,976) and @annhoang (176:95) but not @johnallsopp (1,387:2,071) even though @marshalk has seven times as many tweets and @annhoang has only 12% of the followers.
Besides the well-known flaw of assuming follower counts have any absolute meaning, I think it is a mistake to assume that the number of tweets is the same as how often someone tweets, or more exactly, how often you will see their tweets in your stream. As Jon Marks notes, first you need to discount @replies. Then you need to look at how long they’ve been on Twitter, because the longer you’re on, the more tweets you have. And the longer someone has been on, the more you need to look at how often they tweet *now*: they may have gone a little crazy two years ago, or maybe live-tweeted some conferences.
But, hey, you can use any rules you like – this is Twitter!
Your rules seem a bit arbitrary and, well, I can’t imagine how they would result in use/outcomes that anyone might generally consider effective – any more so than just choosing to, for example, periodically un-follow people at random.
I suppose that’s one way of using Twitter, and if it works for you that is all that matters.
Janus – this may require an “over beers” discussion in Philly, cause whatever way I slice it, it still comes up nuts. :) But there are worse dogma’s to follow in life I suppose.
I’d think the fact that you can only follow 2 of the 10 folks you consider key influencers says it all.
Happy tweeting,
Jeff Cram
Thanks for all the comments. Here’s some additional thoughts:
1) @McBoof, even though I do no longer follow your fire-hose-like tweets, I’m still a faithful subscriber to your blog RSS feed. Let me know if you reduce the noise and get some more followers and then I might even follow you again. Sad to hear that it had consequences for your job that I unfollowed you.
2) @proobs & sggottlieb: Thanks for sharing some suggestions for Twitter users that meet my criteria, like @BarbraStreisand and @aplusk. These might be great for you and others, but they don’t really make me any more productive.
3) Most of you who objected to my simple rule have far more tweets than followers. I simply wanted to share how I use Twitter and then everybody can experiment and use Twitter however they want
4) Believe it or not, I’ve actually gained a few followers today, so I don’t have to unfollow myself as some suggested
Twitter is clearly still mostly populated by early-adopters. It will be interested to see how the usage of the tool evolves as adoption moves more main-stream. I liked this recent NY Times article on “Why Twitter Will Endure”: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/03/weekinreview/03carr.html
All the best
I found this interesting from the fine folks that run http://twendz.waggeneredstrom.com/ who replied to me a few minutes ago on Twitter.
@jeffcram Just ran a query.. 76% of our influencers have more tweets than followers. We have 470k influencers, 17 million twitter users.
Ok – back to some real work.
Jeff Cram
No intention of reducing my noise, I’m afraid. Twitter is for chatting and engaging with your followers. By your rule, my engagement actually means an average of one tweet for each of my followers, which ain’t how I roll. You’ll find the majority of my tweets start with an @ …
I think you’ll also find that peoples followers (especially in our industry) don’t increase as fast as you’d think. We saturate the market quite quickly. So, as time passes, you’ll have less and less people you’re eligible to follow except for fake celebs, social-media douchebags and people that have nothing to say.
But as you say, each to his own :-) I’m already regretting quitting my job over this.
Janus, dear… I’ll be quick: I am seriously disappointed in you. Not that my opinion matters much.
When you make #1 on a list based on a yet another ridiculosity-infused decision/algorithm (http://wefollow.com/twitter/cms), we can talk again.
Sorry my tweets are too boring for your tres refined social media taste ;) Strange that you’re a minority.
I’m surprised by this to be honest Janus and I’m saying this as a J Boye customer and member of your target audience.
While I agree with you about limiting noise, I personally believe you can self-screen/filter Twitter comments as you do advertising. You let the uninteresting stuff wash over you and tune it out.
I really do think you risk missing more rounded views, particularly from your main target audience of organisations with CMS challenges, and could be in danger of being seen as ‘incurious’. You also risk a potentially unhealthy following/follower list dominated by vendors and their associates.
We are all experimenting with this new environment in different ways and that leads to different techniques being employed at different times – a constant process of try, tune, repeat.
Personally I’ve been looking at testing and debunking, where relevant, the Twitter influence tools such as Klout and TweetLevel. It is interesting that if you follow the philosophy and approach you’ve outlined above then it is effectively saying the measures these tools use, such as ‘engagement’ ‘reach’ and ‘amplification’ are flawed. Ultimately, you may yet be proved right on that but certainly for now, in this pioneering and experimental phase, I think you are in a minority as Irina says above.
I think this is my favourite ever posting – When tech and personalities collide!
Ohhh boy, you go off line for a couple of days rest, and miss all sorts of interesting conversations !
What can I say, but Jon I rarely get such praise !
I can see what Janus is trying to achieve – its all about filtering whether its drinking from the fire hose that is Twitter, corporate in box email hell, etc. I have not found the perfect way of filtering yet, so its very manual for me, and that can be time consuming. Of course I am also heavily constrained by a corporate desktop which is locked down and does not allow me to run various useful twitter clients or other software.
But as someone said above, each to their own.
Oh crikey Janus, what have you done?
I like Jon’s maths, at some point all of us CMS tweeters will run out of worthy folks to entice into following us. I hit a plateau of followers for a bit and by your reckoning I should have ceased tweeting – until some young lovely follows me in the hope I’ll pop by her website and watch her take her clothes off. How does that help you?
My suggestion – I am trying to use lists as my filter, with ‘must check’ lists of folks that I want to read every thought of and others that I’ll just tune in and out of.
But, I’ve just noticed that you follow us @AlterianCMS – which is excellent, thank you. Although, I think that’s interesting as it’s pretty much me, but just the corporate PR bit. I can’t decide if that proves your rule or not….
Cheers,
Ian
As usual the comments here are much wiser than my initial posting.
It seems like this post has sparked some additional thoughtful external postings on how others use Twitter:
- How @proops uses Twitter: http://contentedmanagement.net/blog/i-know-why-the-caged-bird-sings/
- How @sggottlieb uses Twitter: http://www.contenthere.net/2010/02/how-i-use-twitter-for-work.html
and from late 2007 I found this posting:
- How @jowyang uses Twitter: http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2007/11/29/how-i-use-twitter-and-you/
Good luck with Twitter!
Janus
One last thing I noticed: if you use the new Twitter retweet it doesn’t count as one of your posts. So if you just regurgitate what other people are saying it looks like you’re less garrulous than if you actually have a comment about what’s been said.
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