Pep Up Your Twitter Act

Social media won’t remain quantity over quality for very long. But there are cool tools to organize your activity

If there is one thing i really like about social media, particularly Twitter, it is the fascinating tools user-developers come up with. Some of these tools are just a bit of back-of-the-napkin fun and are experiments that die out once the developer becomes bored with it all, or runs out of the wherewithal to scale up the application. Many other tools, though, make it mainstream, and see a build-up of features and functionality.

Twitter wasn’t built with very many features of its own. There’s barely any organising, except for lists of people you follow, that you can do on Twitter itself. Unless you use some tools from the outside, it can quickly become chaotic, and obviously quite unusable. In fact, the only way to make something of your (or your company’s) Twitter activity, is to manage it actively. If you do this early in the life of the account, you’ll be saved a whole lot of wasted time.

Pretty long ago, I decided I didn’t want to fall into the numbers trap on my individual accounts. I could tweet everything on my mind and update my social statuses frequently, but I know I would end up with more followers, but that would mean quantity over quality and I’m sure I’ll find I can’t keep up with the interaction necessary to make meaning out of those numbers. But there are many ways to do it. For a company account, you could have several people with access, and each could manage different lists of people. Or, you could spread engagement over different platforms such as your website, LinkedIn groups, blogs, etc. and use Twitter to direct people to these.

Either way, you still need to follow people who are worthwhile to interact with. Social media sites are not going to remain quantity over quality for very long. Unlike with websites, the tools out there come up with analytics that are accessible to all, and that means social media has to be used ‘socially’, for interaction not broadcast.

A simple tool I came across recently took my fancy because it not only “cleans” your Twitter account, it indirectly gives you suggestions on how to improve the quality of your account. Twit Cleaner is by no means flawless and there are probably more like it around, but it can help you make decisions on the people you follow.

You head to thetwitcleaner.com and log in with your Twitter id. You request a report on the people you follow, and you get that in a few minutes. Then the fun starts.

Sorrowfully, I had to unfollow several of my very best friends. My report showed that they were doing nothing with their accounts. I promise to follow them when they wake up, but until they have a handful of tweets or have not said a word for a month, they’ll have to go. Why does it bother me to have them around? Ah, it affects my influence score and other analytics.

My Twit Cleaner report card also tells me that I follow a bunch of people who only post links. Now, a tool like this should be able to distinguish between a user who posts links that are consumed widely, and those that are not. Or, it should be able to figure out whether the user is a news account. So here’s where you have to make your own decisions and unfollow accounts that you’ve never really clicked on links from, or don’t trust. I refused, for example, to unfollow BBC News even if that account broadcasts links.

Twit Cleaner will also tell you whether an account posts the same or similar links all the time. This helps you weed out spammers. Apparently, this tool used to unfollow users for you automatically, until Twitter wisely put a stop to that. The decisions should definitely be in the users’ hands.

Another parameter in the report lists users who are “all talk all the time”. That would be fewer links and more chatter. This could help you weed out those people who flood your timeline with quotes and just by over-tweeting.

You can also see who has little original content but a high percentage of retweets. Of course, the account could be retweeting because the user is aggregating useful content — so again, you need to check before you clean. The same goes for accounts that follow less than 10 per cent of those who follow them. This could be because someone is using Twitter as a broadcast or redirection medium but engaging elsewhere.

So, by no means a foolproof tool, but more of an example. And it just goes to show what you need to do with your account so your followers don’t unfollow you: tweet enough, but not too much, don’t let long gaps go by, don’t get by with QOTDs or retweets of others’ content, don’t bombard people with selling messages, follow people and interact with them — and you should have quality time on Twitter.

(This story was published in Businessworld Issue Dated 13-09-2010)