I've changed my Twitter follow policy and some thoughts on Twitter lists and the infamous retweet

Twitter is on everyone's screen now.

The adoption of Twitter for commercial purposes is now old hat, as is using the platform to broadcasts all sorts of useless and spammy information.

Several months back I spoke of my idealistic approach to following people, who was I to judge whether what someone had to say wasn't going to be helpful or informative for me, if they've followed me I should follow them back and see what they've got to say.

Well I've altered my approach and no longer follow people back based on this hope.

Why?

Well, for one, there are many accounts that now follow me that with a quick glance I can see they are going to add no value to my feed what so ever.

Generally these accounts are those that just broadcast links relating to a specific subject matter. I can only follow so many accounts that broadcast links on a news subject area.

Some of these purely use Twitter as a RSS feed, just publishing their latest blog posts from their corporate site and no person to person engagement. Why do this when you could gain so much more from the platform? Personally I find this has a negative effect on me about a brand.

Using Twitter for auto publishing blog updates utilises none of the real benefits of Twitter. Using Twitter just to share URL's with a personalised message is no different from using Google Reader's share functionality.

I was reading one Twitter users bio and I am sure they had something along the lines of a "every tweet will contain a link" statement. I believe the user in question worked in user experience. This just doesn't equate with my user experience of Twitter.

Again, I just can't follow any more Twitter users that only broadcast quotes, I think I now know the whole of the Collins Quotes reference front to back. Equally the same goes for anyone that feels the need to mention making money via Twitter every 5 tweets or so.

I guess I'm just being a little bit grumpy with some of these actions and as I've said before, who is anyone to dictate how to use Twitter. It's a rule free platform and that's one of its greatest assets.

I’ve talked before about the hyperlocal community on Twitter and the benefits this can lead to; this is something I’m realising more and more. I’ve increased my deliberate following of individuals within the UK (an even more locally to the north of England) and within my industry sector. This has improved the generally value I’m finding I get from my feed dramatically.

At the end of the day, as hard as it may be to believe at the moment, Twitter isn’t going to be the headline grabbing platform it currently is. At some point there will be a new application that will be riding the tipping point wave.

Creating a more personable on-line representation of yourself or your brand will help you with this transition when it occurs. After all, being active on Twitter is not about Twitter itself, it's about raising brand or your own individual awareness.

In the meantime I'm liking most of Twitter's recent updates, particularly lists. Twitter Lists are a fantastic method for growing your relevant community, delving around someone else’s list for interesting new additions to your community has become a valuable process.

I’ve also been immaturely enjoying creating some rather pointless lists myself in order to communicate a bitterness that lies deep within my soul!

I now have a sin-bin for those that I communicate to, but never deem it necessary to reply to me. I know we are all busy and some have enormous Twitter accounts (try saying that in the pub without receiving some funny stares), but hey, after several messages it just feels like anti-social media. Putting people into this list provides me with hours of pointless mad cackling.

I wish Twitter would implement some way to search your followers more effectively and also some inbuilt filtering. Scrolling through page after page of followers is tedious; if I can search within them it would be far easier. Better still, why doesn’t the web interface not yet support a filter to show which of your followers are following you back?

The same love can not be given to Twitter’s implementation of the retweet. Thankfully the likes of TweetDeck provide you with the option to send the message as a Twitter retweet or to edit the original still. I’d be interested to see some stats from the likes of TweetDeck on percentages using each option.

Anyway, that's enough meanderings for this post. How's everyone else finding lists and the retweet feature?

While I'm at it, has anyone done any detailed investigation into the benefits of Google live search functionality yet?


Related reading:

What makes us social and is social media a good thing? - Digital Signals http://www.digital-constructions.com/blog/2009/09/what-makes-us-social-and-is-social.html

Is social media the perfect tonic to pre-recession greed? - Digital Signals http://www.digital-constructions.com/blog/2009/08/is-social-media-perfect-tonic-to-pre.html

Why bother with social media? - Digital Signals http://www.digital-constructions.com/blog/2009/06/why-bother-with-social-media.html

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