Pull a tune from the wall of sound

May 9, 2012 8:18 AM

Is it possibly to meaningfully engage with a large number of twitter followers?

So I've got a twitter account where I follow a large number of people (around 2500) and also have a large number of followers (nearly 3000) with a significant overlap between them. At the moment I only really interact with a small percentage of these (a list of friends and occasionally those that interact with my directly either DMing or @ing) I'd like to reach out to more, find stuff to retweet etc but at the moment it's hard to find interesting / relevant stuff in the continuous stream. I had thought Lists would be the answer but twitter only lets you have a limited number of these.

At the moment I use Tweetdeck on a pc. Tried Hootsuit but don't really like it. Is there some other ap/program out there or some technique that can help or is it just a case of randomly sampling in the hope of hitting something.

posted by fearfulsymmetry to computers & internet (3 answers total)

I'm not a serious Twitter person (but I study some folks who are) and I think it kind of depends on what you mean by "meaningfully engage." Do you want to be able to hear from large numbers of them? Or have large numbers of them RT what you post?

You might be interested in some of the scholarship of danah boyd. She studies new media use (specifically w/r/t youth) and has done some "serious research" based on data from Tweets -- how people use it, how many followers they have, how many they follow, etc. You can, of course, follow her on Twitter :)
posted by pantarei70 at 9:08 AM on May 9, 2012

To increase the number of lists, couldn't you create secondary accounts, and follow some of the people on those? I have a secondary account that I use solely to follow higher-volume tweeters (though I don't follow anywhere close to 2500 people, which strikes me as a rather Sisyphean task!).
posted by Greg Nog at 9:10 AM on May 9, 2012

at the moment it's hard to find interesting / relevant stuff in the continuous stream

is there a reason you follow 2500 people when you're not finding interesting/relevant stuff in their stream?

My Twitter strategy (though admittedly I'm not as big a user as you) has been to really throttle down my incomining stream. I have about 600 followers but only follow about 300 people. If I find someone in the incoming stream isn't really 'delivering value' in terms of posting stuff I find interesting, relevant, or worthy of further sharing, I have few compunctions about removing them. You can always read their feed anyway by going to their homepage, assuming it's open, but you don't have to sort through it in your own incoming feed.

This has worked really well so far. When I scroll through the updates, I see a great list of really interesting comments/discussions/stuff. Periodically I check my followers to see if there's someone I'd like to add. I also check hashtags I'm interested in to see what conversations are happening. But I'm pretty picky about whom I actually follow, because I'm leasing those folks brainspace, and I want it to be of benefit to me, not just a timewaster.
posted by Miko at 10:31 AM on May 9, 2012