It’s been a few months since I began my attempt to limit the people I follow on Twitter to 250, cutting the amount I then followed roughly in half. The rationale was that 250 was kind of a magic number where you could actually keep the daily stream of content manageable and see pretty much everything that has been posted without investing too much time.
For many people this would be easy but I actually rely on Twitter to stay current on a lot of things that are important to my job as a consultant (and my media addiction). I absolutely hate it when a client who’s not as engaged in my industry asks me if I’ve heard of something and I don’t even have conversational knowledge of it. These are the bizarre nightmares that keep me up at night. I’m not proud.
Cutting the people I follow down to 250 was a little harder than I thought. Here are just a few of the challenges I faced somewhat unexpectedly:
- I had a genuine fear of running into people who would be offended that I unfollowed them. Of course this is silly but given the non-interruptive nature of Twitter, it was hard to justify that the value of removing someone was worth making a colleague or friend upset.
- There are more good low volume users than I expected so deleting them from my stream would serve little signal-to-noise ratio benefit and potentially distance me from good content.
- Some high volume users occasionally have great content, making the noise worth it.
That doesn’t mean that I wasn’t able to uncover some good tactics for reducing noise. If anything, the struggle down to 250 made me a much better Twitter user and it had nothing to do with finding some magical app to parse all the content for me.
The one thing that helped me the most was learning that there really isn’t much of a reason to follow a brand or organization on Twitter. When I looked at all branded feeds, from newspapers to consumer brands I was really passionate about, Twitter just didn’t make a lot of sense as a platform for them. Most of these brands provided RSS feeds of one kind or another so it was generally preferable to sort them in my Google Reader, which allows both easier scanning and, in most cases, near immediate access to the content without opening new links, windows and all the other hoops you have to jump through that detract from good UX within social services. Exceptions to this rule were customer service accounts from brands like Jet Blue and Comcast, though those were temporary follows anyway.
Once I had Twitter narrowed down to individuals it was time to look at what sort of usage behavior resulted in the most noise. For my stream, the #1 misuse of Twitter was using the service as a public IM conversation. In a quick scan, 18 out of 20 @ replies (not retweets) were personal conversations between two or more people with no context. While I believe that Twitter is non-interruptive enough to accommodate some direct interpersonal public dialogue, it is indisputably a group conversation tool so if you’re not providing context for your content you’re creating noise. People that were using Twitter consistently as public IM had to be weeded out.
Next I encountered what I would call “soft spam.” This is content that is produced, largely by third party applications, that doesn’t offer a lot of value to a group. The most common example of this is Foursquare location check-ins. While many people find these annoying since they’re so rarely actionable, it’s probably worth remembering that this was actually supposed to be the original functionality of Twitter…it was supposed to just tell people where you were in case they were looking for you. Of course, the platform has evolved and so have usage habits but I still find these kinds of tweets to non-interruptive enough and generally sporadic enough that they don’t really detract from my content stream. For the most part, I tolerate these.
The biggest lesson I learned throughout this experiment was that Twitter has become just central enough to my media universe that I really can’t reduce the amount of people I follow to 250.
I equate this to cable television.
While I’d love to get rid of cable or reduce my bill, there are some things I love to watch and, once I commit to the platform, I naturally want to get the most out of it. Deciding whether or not to follow someone is like deciding whether or not to add HBO. There is a cost in adding people to follow, in the amount of content they will produce and taking the time to read/consider it, but if you don’t follow you’re at much greater risk of missing content that is important to you. Unfortunately you have to weigh that on a case-by-case basis and there are few bundled options.
What Twitter will need to figure out is how it will exist with more users talking than are listening. Power users, who generally follow more than 1000 users, are missing the majority of the content being posted in their streams. Often they’re producing a large amount of content at the same time so any real utility is being lost in the crossfire. Sure, Twitter can be a broadcast channel for a popular voice but if everyone is broadcasting and no one is listening then you’re just sending content into a void.
I now follow 295 people but I’m adding carefully. If I post something from a third party app or bit.ly bookmarlet, I make a point to go and catch up where I left off. There’s still plenty of noise in my stream but every source has been reviewed. The only way to completely eliminate noise is to live in a vacuum so you’re probably better off just trying to find ways to reduce it.
