This article is by Brendan Moore (@webmusicguy), Founder of Receptive Music, a digital marketing agency that makes the web work for artists.
If you continually follow new people on Twitter, you will quickly get a couple hundred (to thousands) of people you are following, and your Twitter timeline will move way too fast to stay up-to-date with. Worse than that, you will have lost context of who all these people are that you decided to follow. Here’s how to stay organized:
1. Each Time You Follow Someone, Add Them to a List
Twitter’s List feature was created to help you organize your followers.
• Unfamiliar with lists? View Twitter’s guide for How to Use Lists
Each time you follow someone, add them to a list based on why you followed them (friend? co-worker? industry expert? celebrity? colleague? funny?)
2. Use Formulists
If you already have a chunk of unorganized followers (like me), there is a powerful free tool called Formulists that will organize lists for your account.
• You can create self-updating lists that will continually organize your followers into specified Lists based on your criteria
• Examples: Create a list of all my followers who….
• Live in Austin
• Talk about ________ (the music industry? a certain band? graphic design? web development?)
• I mention the most
• Talk to me (@reply me) the most
• I retweet the most
• Retweet me the most
• Etc, etc, etc.
3. Use TweetDeck
TweetDeck is another powerful free tool that is a twitter client (meaning you can use TweetDeck to use Twitter instead of going to Twitter.com)
The best feature of TweetDeck (in my opinion) is the column view, where you can setup multiple columns that display different timelines of tweets or users.
For example, I have a column of all people that mention me or my company in their tweets, so that I can easily see and respond to them. I also have separate columns set up for each of my Twitter Lists, to easily and visually see my followers organized.
You can also setup a column to collect any tweets talking about a specified keyword.
• For example: If you are an artist that sounds like Jason Mraz, you could set up a column for anyone tweeting about Jason Mraz, and start talking to them.
• Note: Use this tactic wisely, or it will work adversely! Don’t spam people. Be genuinely interested in creating a conversation with them!
About the Author:
Brendan runs Receptive Music, a digital music marketing firm. We make the web work for artists by integrating marketing campaigns with web and social media development.
Get in touch with him on Twitter (@webmusicguy) or email.