Have you become desensitized and disillusioned with Twitter?
Do you feel like you are suffering from Twitter Tiredness?
Do you feel like you are “tweeting in the dark”, spending more and more time on Twitter but getting less and less out of it?
I know the story. A few months (or years) ago, you signed up for a Twitter account. You dutifully wrote a clever bio, uploaded your picture and started tweeting. Maybe you followed some accounts and learned a bit about the culture and etiquette of the network before sending your first tweet.
After following a few people and building a following of your own, you started following more and more and retweeting more and more, all while spending less and less time engaging in conversations and writing original tweets.
You have now realized that keeping up with the never-ending stream of news and content on Twitter can be overwhelming and over stimulating.
Things have managed to get out of control in your Twitterverse. You are considering dropping the social network all together.
Now for the good news – You can take the power back!
You have the power to control your Twitter experience. Here are my top 5 tips for regaining control and getting your groove back:
1) Unfollow people. It may seem harsh, but you need to go through the list of accounts you Follow and hit the Unfollow button several (if not many) times. Doing so will dramatically refresh your Twitter account. Want to find out who hasn’t sent out a tweet in months, who doesn’t have an avatar (a red flag of a spammer) and who isn’t following you back? Use a free service like the popular ManageFlitter to clean up and manage who you follow. You will feel lighter, cleaner and more in control of the content you see on Twitter after a good Follow purge!
2) Use Twitter Lists to your advantage. You don’t have to Follow a Twitter user to put them on one of your Lists! Lists are a great way to cut through all the Twitter clutter (Twutter?). For example, I created an “A-List” of my favorite and most interesting Tweeps, in topics ranging from nonprofits to social media to women’s issues. Creating such a list saves time, creates community (it’s pretty awesome to be added to someone’s List) and filters out conversations that may be spam/coupons. Kim Garst (definitely on my “A-List”) wrote a great post on how you can use Twitter lists for time management and profit.
3) Start using Buffer. Immediately. I will soon write an entire Ode to Buffer, a love note of sorts, because I have become completely enamored and obsessed with this incredible time-saving application. The brilliance behind Buffer is that you can create an individualized schedule of tweets to post at all times of the day and night. This ensures a constant presence on Twitter and minimizes the “fire-tweeting” that occurs when you send 6-10 rapid-fire tweets in a row. I use it for all the Twitter accounts I manage professionally and it has significantly improved engagement. Buffer is free (up to a point), and claims to increase by 200% users’ clicks on links, retweets, number of followers, Klout score, and more. Worth checking out for the time-saving benefits alone.
4) Sign up for The Tweeted Times and get a free “newspaper”-esque electronic publication of tweets with photos, links and other helpful information. This is useful for doing a quick scan of your tweets and seeing what is most popular with your specific Twitterverse. It also gives you more information than can fit into 140 characters, but managed to keep it simple enough so that it’s similar to scanning headlines and the lead paragraph of a newspaper article.
5) Be original. If you feel like you are just regurgitating information and retweeting article links, try to actually write your own tweet. Write a piece of helpful information, a summary of a news article or an idea for a future blog post and tweet it out. Do this a few times a week, and measure the results.
6) Stop syncing your Twitter account with your Facebook and LinkedIn accounts. What started out as a time-saver is now annoying everyone in your online communities. Frequent posts on Twitter are encouraged – posts more than twice a day on Facebook and LinkedIn are asking for a user to click the “Hide” or “Block” button. Twitter has a particular feel to it that cannot be easily copied in Facebook and LinkedIn (who wants to see all those hashtags and @mentions when not on Twitter?) Start tweeting just for tweeting’s sake and I am positive you will reap the benefits of increased engagement (and fan appreciation) from all your social networks.
How are you using Twitter? Are there any tips that I missed? Please post your ideas in the Comments section. Thanks for reading!
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I love these kinds of posts! I only wish I had thought to write this first
Great work and thanks for the advice!
Thanks so much!
Very helpful – thanks!
I’m glad you liked it!
Suggest you set up the Buffer button on your site, too, as I’ve done. It allows you or or anyone else to future-post whatever tweet from your site that you want.
Ari – Do you know how to do this on WordPress? I’ve set up the sharing buttons at the bottom of each post but I can’t find the option to put in a Buffer button. I am obsessed with Buffer – I love it!
Get the script at http://bufferapp.com/extras/button
Thanks!!
I think Buffer is great too. Useful post, thanks.
An alternative to 1) unfollowing people, which may cause offense if they are also following you, is to use your A-list (I have one too) as your main stream.
That way I can follow lots of people but have a manageable list of the main tweets I’m interested in. (I view my A-list through Hootsuite, along with my other lists.)
I have a policy that I only follow people that are following me back. I make very few exceptions to this rule, and I have to cull through my followers/following often to get this balance. I always think – If they don’t think I am important enough to follow, why should I reciprocate? Lists are a great to not Follow people but still see their tweets.
Everyone will tweet as everyone wants.
Personally,the beauty of Twitter (vs Facebook/LinkedIn) is the lack of required reciprocity. I want the ability to follow @BreakingNews without requiring the news site to follow me. I’ve also learned over time that the more rules of my own I try to impart the more people I meet who don’t know my rules — leading me to kill the rules.
You declared “Twitter bankruptcy” a while ago, right? I wanted to ask you about that… I think it’s an intriguing idea!
Also I completely disagree about the “lack of required reciprocity”. I think it is absolutely required to reciprocate and create good karma on Twitter and Facebook!
“If they don’t think I am important enough to follow, why should I reciprocate?”
Why? Because of your next sentence: “Lists are a great to not follow people but still see their tweets.”
If someone is not following you but is listing you, will you reciprocate?
I was uncomfortable with the fact that I was following all these people who were not following me back – to me, that seems to defeat the point of Twitter. But that’s just my opinion. If someone has me in a list that is a great honor, and I would consider putting them in a list of mine. I would definitely look at their Twitter stream to see if there is something I want to retweet, or a way I could help them in any way. I like to do that will all my new followers. Just my personal preference! We can talk more at our lunch today!
[...] How to spend less time on Twitter and get more out of it (jcsocialmarketing.com) [...]
Hmm, late to the part here, but…
Buffer is cool. I also use HootSuite for the same purpuse, plus others, such as delegating work to collaborators, managing multiple Twitter accounts via a single dashboard, and on and on.
Who here has tried both Buffer and Twitter? What are your preferences, and why?
Holla back!
Ed
@fanfoundry
What do you mean, Ed? I tweet — and I share specific items via Buffer. It’s not an either-or.
Ed, I use both Hootsuite and Buffer, as I mentioned above.
Buffer is obviously great for setting up a series of tweets that you want fired off during the day. That can be to all your networks, or different messages depending on the network.
Hootsuite is a bit better as an interface for writing tweets and I’ve started to find myself scheduling the occasional tweet through that. That’s when I want it to go at a specific time but I don’t want to change my Buffer schedule.
I’ve also found myself doing the same odd thing as someone else I read the other day (I can’t remember who). Because it’s a nicer editor, I sometimes choose to retweet a message in Hootsuite, edit it, but not send it in Hootsuite. Instead I copy and past it into Buffer to go out on the configured schedule.
I use both and find that HootSuite is better for scheduling Facebook posts in the future. Buffer is definitely my preferred method for sending tweets. Glad to see that all of you are using both and finding them helpful!
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Hello Julia, Ari, Tony and others,
There is a new twitter tool called Pluggio that does what you currently have to use both Hootsuite and Buffer to accomplish. It lets you drip feed your buffered posts, and is a great interface for reading and writing tweets.
It will also take care of monitoring your followers and suggesting people to unfollow based on who isn’t following you back.
Check it out – http://plugg.io
I will definitely check it out; thanks for posting!