How to make Sense of your Social Media Again
Twitter is the go to social medium for me. Twitter interactions are to the point and commenting, liking and re-tweeting are great tools. Also lists are great to keep your information flow under control.
But after being on Twitter for a long time things get well [scoffs] … complicated. At a certain point, not to long ago, I found myself having a senseless live stream of tweets randomly ‘liking’ and ‘re-tweeting’ things that ‘might’ be interesting. Not very satisfactory at all once you take a step back.
I followed 2000 + accounts with kind of the same number of followers. In the beginning it was more like a trofee to gather as many people/accounts. Maybe trofee is not the right term, but more the initial excitement of being able to follow so many people.
Now the old adagio ‘Quality over quantity’ kicks in. I had to get rid of a lot of accounts I follow to again make sense of my ‘social’ life. There is no easy way to do that with Twitter, but I found ManageFlitter, which easily lets you weed out accounts that are quiet, fake, low influence etc. With the free version you are able to remove 100 accounts a day. That totally worked for me. After 10 days I dropped 1000 accounts I followed bringing back sanity in my stream.
Make friends, don’t just “follow”
Whilst in my catharsis I bumped into below tweet by Christian Heilmann, which added even more sense to a meaningful ‘social’ interaction.
You probably know the feeling when going through your stream you witlessly ‘like’ and re-tweet, which again for me was unsatisfactory.
It is not that difficult. Take a breather when a tweet intrigues you and ask yourself what your comment on this would be. Like Christian says explain ‘why it’s important or good’. This approach got me into a few really interesting conversations.
It is not only about taking social media back from the bots, but changing our bot like behaviour back to human social behaviour.
Peace out!