Twitter is my primary advocacy and communications platform. It’s the place where I find the strongest convergence of Voices that I listen to, interact with, and serve. Only on Twitter do I find breaking news, in-depth analysis, global thinkers, missionally-minded, mission agencies, churches, and potential missionary candidates. So it’s the place I hover a lot of the time.
Because this is such an important tool for me, it’s important that I have a good strategy for using it. I’m going to try and describe a bit of my current strategy, which is continually evolving as I try to use Twitter’s intricacies to my advantage. I hope this will help you as you think about the ways you use Twitter as well.
Many people who use Twitter—including many I interact with, and who follow me—never come close to Twitter’s limits. Nevertheless, they are there: you can follow a maximum of 2,000 people in your “home” stream, and each list can follow a maximum of 500 people as well. You can generally have an unlimited number of followers, of course. But you can’t break the 500-max list limit, and if you want to follow more than 2,000, then you have to achieve a certain “ratio” of followers-to-followed which isn’t published.
Likely, the ratio is something like 5:1 or so between who follows you and who you follow. Robert Scoble (@scobleizer), a famous tech blogger, has 224k followers and follows 32k people. That’s a 7:1 ratio. Andy Carvin (@acarvin), a prolific writer about the Arab Spring, follows 2,000 people and has 58,000 followers. That’s a ratio of about 1:25.
So one consideration is how you “spend” the 2,000 follows you have. If you want to follow a lot of people, then part of your strategy has to be to use these initial “follows” to help generate more followers, thus increasing your follow account. Alternatively, you can choose to limit yourself to 2,000 and simply spend those follows wisely.
Obviously, one doesn’t want to follow people just because they follow you. What we want is vision, community and collaboration. So it’s useful to think in terms of people you engage with, people you typically retweet (who inform you and influence you), and people who typically retweet you (as a measure of how well you are “spreading” your vision and finding new collaborative partners).
People you engage with – your community, tribe, the ones who collaborate with you.
People you retweet – who bring you information, may not be in your tribe, your “weak links” to other communities—very important in small worlds!
People who retweet you – who spread your vision even if they aren’t part of your tribe, and who are “weak links” to attract people who are part of your tribe.
Each of these types of individuals are very important to growing a decentralized network or community, and are not to be ignored.
My strategy for my home stream is still evolving. I did a mass unfollow today, and I have only re-added about 70 people so far. However, I make extensive use of lists, and I didn’t delete them! Many of my lists are private (not public). I have lists for different kinds of voices (foreign missionary societies, development agencies, journalists, pastors, etc), and lists for the above categories. Each list often has several hundred people in it, and a few have the maximum of 500. These are my information “fishing pools.”
From these choose certain “top” people with whom I frequently engage, RT, or who RT me, to be in my home stream. I use hootsuite and flipboard to frequently monitor the sublists, so I don’t ignore those. For example, I have a list of news agencies (you can follow it at twitter.com/justindlong/news), which right now has 107 different world news sources in it. I have another list for breaking news, which is private and just has 5 news sources in it that are “breaking wire news”—I can quickly glance at just the first page of that and see what’s been happening in the past 30 minutes. Finally, I have a third private list which is my “top news”—no more than 15 sources in that, chosen to represent the best of the best worldwide. As you might imagine, I dip into breaking and top more often than my big news list.
Of these news lists, which ones will make it on to the home page? Right now, I’m thinking that one breaking news source and 2 or 3 from the top news list will probably go on the home feed. These will be “trip wires” that let me know when I need to hit the sub list.
And that’s an important concept. I am right now envisioning my home page feed as both the central update for those closest to me (my close tribe, about 150 people) and as a “trip wire” for certain sub lists (for example, @acarvin is on my home feed—he is my “trip wire” for things unfolding in the Middle East). If you have one “trip wire” for each world region, that leads to a sublist, you can cover the world—while not being inundated.
Avoiding information overload and knowing what’s important at any given moment is the key here.
Does this help you? What strategies do you use to bring information to you?
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Justin,
I wanted to let you know that I came onto Twitter primarily because of your influence when I attended your Swarming seminar. And since I had no idea who to follow or even who to think about following, at that time, I looked at who you followed and picked from your list. In time, after enjoying some similar followed names, I was able to hone in more keenly to a few branches from those original ones. And then those branches recommended others. This is how a newbie like me started on Twitter. I recently went through my list and cut out past interests that no longer pertain to my current interests. I want to thank you for helping me Justin!
It’s definitely a good way of starting out. In fact, that’s pretty much how I started out, as well. The big trick, I think, is to be willing and able to “unfollow” people!