Prevent your Twitter stream from becoming a flood

Loic Le Meur, a high profile geek and founder of Seesmic, took drastic action yesterday and unfollowed 23,000 twitter users via an unfollow script. He simply became overwhelmed with the spam, robots, and noise so he decided to unfollow everyone and reboot his twitter stream. His newly imposed criteria for following a twitter user is now, “I need to be able to explain in a few sentences how I know you or why I am following you otherwise I won’t add you.”

As you might imagine this has created a firestorm. Loic has spent the time since his “twitter bankruptcy” explaining his actions to those he unfollowed and Robert Scoble followed up by starting a hotly debated thread on Friendfeed.

UPDATE: It looks like @Loic was onto to something because mass unfollowing on Twitter is happening all over. Check out “Now Trending On Twitter: Mass Unfollowing” for details oh how many high profile social medians are having to rethink their Twitter usage.

Before I continue let me add a couple of disclaimers.

1. Social media usage is a personal decision and Loic shouldn’t have to defend anything action he takes.
2. Participation in social media is an intensely personal activity and it is different for everyone.
3. I have no idea the time and energy it takes what is like to maintain the levels of interaction that internet celebs like Loic and Scoble manage. I can only speak about my experience.

The problem is simple. More quantity will ultimately lead to less quality. Signal vs Noise.

How do you navigate an information stream so that it doesn’t become an overwhelming flood?

I often hear this sentiment expressed by Twitter users who only follow 100-200 people (40% of which are truly active) and see that I follow 1500+ twitter users. They wonder how I have meaningful interactions and discover new content in such a busy environment. How do I maintain the signal of quality content and cancel the noise?

I don’t have a concise answer but I feel compelled to share a few of my tips.

• I have never automatically followed those who follow me on twitter. I’d guess that my followback ratio is close to 70% but I think turning off autofollow is an important way to prevent noisemakers or low value twitterers from cluttering your stream. In addition I often decide not to followback based on the following criteria: (for more see my Social Media Usage Policy)
  • The user is new and hasn’t proved that they are going to be an active member of my community.
  • The user only promotes their own content and never engages other users in conversations.
  • The user is an obvious marketer/spammer.
• I use groups in Tweetdeck. This is such an obvious solution but so few twitter users utilize this tool. Sure I follow 1770 users but I categorize people into several different groups based on interest, value, and locale. I use 3 primary groups.
  • Page 1: This is a list of people that I consider high value.
  • A-List: A list of people that have high value but due to high traffic may overwhelm the others I follow.
  • Local: I’m active in my local social media community and I like to know what is going on in my backyard.
  • Security: A list of the security professionals that I follow.
• I use Twitter search RSS feeds to track topics and hashtags of interest or live events so I can interact with users that aren’t in my personal stream. If I want to track them real time I use Tweetabs.
• Most Importantly I treat my information stream as a stream. When I want to get wet I hop in and enjoy the water and then I’m done. You have to drop the “email mentality” of thinking there is something you missed or you must catch up. Don’t worry about what happened 3 days ago on Twitter. It is a “right now” technology. Jump in, take a swim, log out.

• UPDATE: Follower Management – I have found that using a good follower management tool can help you selectively prune your list as you see fit. The best tool out there is by far Refollow.com. You can sort followers by numerous variables and bulk unfollow.

I don’t blame @Loic for dumping all of his followers but I have too many excellent people in my twitter stream to consider such an action. I much prefer to use tools and applications to create sub-groups within the social media masses. Give it a try and I think it will enhance your enjoyment of any social media.

Do you have other tips? How do you manage your information stream?

Related posts:

1. The 411 on my Twitter Directories
2. Twitter Lists – the big picture
3. Twitter’s Killer Feature

Tagged as: Data Flow, Twitter, Twitter Bankruptcy