Twitter cull – confessions of a “growing up” Tweeter
I **love** Twitter – more specifically the extended PLN that lurking round in education related #hashtags brings. But like many Tweeters my Twitter journey has followed a predictable path:
When I started with Twitter, there was a feeling of “WOW!” all those people out there ready to communicate with me – and if I’m honest, the feeling that “WOW! an audience for me to communicate with”
It felt like a platform for me to spout my opinions, and the world being a big place, I would connect with like minded people and feel justified in having my opinions in the first place — it was a self affirmatory process. I tweet – people comment, so I was right to tweet in the first place.
During these early days of Twitter use I was concerned over the number of followers I had and the number of people who followed me. Success was passing each 100 of followers and for me in “collecting” people to follow in turn.
Should someone “important” in the Twitterverse follow me, I was ecstatic.
Slowly though it dawned that there must be a more organised way through all this – I discovered #hashtags. I started hanging out in #ukedchat, #addcym, #mathchat and a raft of other, more focused discussions. >> Great some order to my Tweeting.
But, I steadfastly kept the 800 follows that fed into my “Friends” that I “monitored” – clearly I wasn’t actually monitoring these 800 “friends” and I suspect that I missed more Tweets that I actually read / responded to.
So, today I culled every one of my follows – yes all 800.
This is not a reflection of what I think about any of the wonderful peeps I followed, but more a statement over how I want to get control of Twitter back, and use it for the professional development tool I intended.
Twitter Maturity – #hashtags for CPD
From today, I will continue to dip in /out of #hashtagged conversations – that way I can streamline what I read and what I comment on.
Sure, I’ll start to follow people again, but I’ll limit it to 20 to 25 “hard core” educationalists – who I can give me attention to — not 800 who I was largely ignoring.
Have you considered a Twitter cull?
4 Comments to “Twitter cull – confessions of a “growing up” Tweeter”
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Glen says:
Hi Dave
New Labour — is that still allowed to be said in public — wait I can here the censors moving in – lol
The growing spam on #hashtags is definitely a genuine concern — and I must admit that I’ve not explored “lists” as an option. I oscillate between TweetDeck and MetroTwit, both of which allow managing and displaying Tweets from lists. I will certainly give this a go – as you say the signal : noise ratio is important.
I hope that my thoughts on “starting again” are better than trying to organise what I had.
Time will tell
Cheers
G
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Tim says:
Interesting. Does that mean that you will no longer see tweets from people that have protected accounts? Even if they use a hashtag, you won’t see their tweets. Maybe there aren’t many people with protected accounts – I don’t know.
I have started to use lists more. Maybe I should consider reducing the number of people I follow (but not a total cull – I want there to be connections through ‘following’ too).
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mmMMM Good point.
I was concious of this — I “think” the consequence is that if they protect their tweets, I wont see them through the #hashtag.
You are the second to advocate LISTS – I’ll give that a go as as create the PLN from scratch.
Still, the benefits of Twitter outweigh the “hassle” at this point.
Cheers
G
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May I offer, without wishing to sound too New Labour, a third way?
My Twitter use has been transformed by using lists to organise people I follow, and TweetDeck, which allows me easy access to those lists.
I can follow loads of people, and will occasionally dip into the the unfiltered stream, but most of the time I pay attention to a few people spread across about 10 lists. How many of these I pay attention to depends on how much other stuff I have going on, and I have learned to not care if I miss something. If it’s that good it’ll come round again.
While I have got hash tag searches running as well, I finding them increasingly spam filled, where as I’ve got better control of the signal : noise ratio in my lists.
Might be one to consider as you regrow your PLN