You can handle this in a few ways:

• Do nothing.
• Use Twitter lists and apps (e.g. TweetDeck, HootSuite) to prioritize feeds into lists, groups or columns.
• Pare down the number of accounts you follow.

It’s the last option I’ll address here. I use a combination of techniques to regularly manage the accounts I follow, and I use several different services to accomplish them.

1. I unfollow accounts that no longer add value to my feed. To help assess this I use a service called TwitCleaner. TwitCleaner doesn’t charge for its services. It analyzes all the accounts you follow, and lets you know which ones it thinks you might want to unfollow. You’ll get a DM with a link to your report page once TwitCleaner finishes its analysis. It will display its findings, in summary and in detail.

Here’s what the categories mean:

• Potentially dodgy behavior (nothing but links, consistently repeating the same URL)
• Other dodgy behavior, now absent (exhibited the behavior above but hasn’t posted anything for a while)
• No activity in over a month
• Not much interaction (fewer than 10 tweets, bots that pump out RSS feeds, hardly follow anyone,)
• All talk, all the time (average over 24 tweets/day in addition to @replies)
• Little original content (most of what they tweet is RTs of others)
• Not so interesting (they talk about themselves more than half of the time, or a very low percentage of the accounts they follow follow them back)

You decide, on an account by account basis, whether to unfollow any of the accounts it suggests as candidates. For example: News feeds and celebrity accounts tend to follow few accounts back; it doesn’t mean you should stop following if you’re interested in what they have to say.

On the other hand, you’ll probably find at least a few accounts to unfollow, for one reason or another. You can also ask TwitCleaner to tell you how your account looks to others who use their service. The results may surprise you!

2. I get a daily report of accounts that have unfollowed me from SocialGrapple. (A link to the report comes via email, which is super handy, although I could generate the same information by visiting the website.) If I was only following any of those accounts as a courtesy, or for a specific time-limited reason like a trip or an online promotion that is over, I’ll likely unfollow back. SocialGrapple will also help you decide whether to check out any of your newest followers more carefully by letting you know if they’re new, have no avatar, a bad ratio of followers to following, etc.

It also shows if you if you’re now “stalking” an account that’s unfollowed you (meaning you’re still following that account). Note: If I remain interested in what that person or feed has to say, I continue to follow even though they’ve unfollowed me. I believe in asynchronous following. I don’t follow people just because they follow me; I follow them because I’m interested in what they’re saying. If someone doesn’t feel the same way about what I’m saying, for whatever reason, c’est la vie.

SocialGrapple isn’t free, but has options ranging from $14 to $125 per month. Each permits up to a certain number s of accounts and keywords to be followed. It’s a really useful service if you’re managing more than one account or if your own account is fairly active. It offers timeline analytics and you can analyze current and potential feeds you’re following by keyword.

3. For an alternate look at accounts to consider unfollowing, I use commun.it. Currently in beta, this service is about building and managing online relationships. With its suggestions for accounts to unfollow, it looks at accounts that have low engagement with you and prioritizes them in terms of relevance and their own influence. That makes sense; a highly influential account is likely to have many followers, which could explains their lower engagement level with any given follower (i.e you).

One final note:  Online reputation measurers (e.g. Klout, PeerIndex) base their estimate of your influence on factors including how engaged your followers are with you (meaning the percentage of your followers who mention, reply and retweet you). If you’re following a bunch of bots or inactive accounts, your scores may suffer because of it. If increasing your Klout score is important to you, that’s another reason to make sure you’re only following accounts that matter to you.

What tools or services do you use to manage your Twitter feed? Please have at it in the comments.

About Me

• The LAPD joins agencies statewide tomorrow (April 4) in beginning zero-tolerance enforcement of laws prohibiting distracted driving. That menas no texting while driving and no taking while driving (unless you’re using a hands-free device). Think abou it folks. There’s NOTHING so important it can’t wait until you’re safely parked. No conversation or SMS is worth your life (or anyone else’s).
• An Etsy seller makes clever use of the Apple logo in these skins for iPhones, iPads and MacBooks.
• My friend Alison Byrne Fields tweeted this link to a New York Times story about Gregory Peck replica eyeglass frames. They’re lovely, and some of the proceeds go to charity, but they’re also pricey ($315). I responded with a suggestion for similar frames by Warby Parker ($95, including the prescription), a company I learned about thanks to my son.
• Jay Siegan, owner of San Francisco’s Red Devil Lounge, said on Twitter “Sometimes I just want to open a store so i can give it a kick-ass name. This is a pure victory!” in reference to this photo. I agree!
• My friend @Cliff *before* his last training run 4 next wk’s Paris Marathon.http://t.co/Z3KROvX. Support him & Medecins Sans Frontieres: http://t.co/WqRGc0D.

You didnt catch my tips on Twitter? Not surprising. One paradox of Twitter is that the more people you follow, the less likely you are to see any given tweet. And if the people (or feeds) you follow are prolific, trying to make sense of the stream is akin to trying to sip from a fire hose.

Sure, you can use a third-party app like TweetDeck and segregate people into columns, but you can end up with so many columns, or so many people IN a column, that it doesnt really fix the problem.

One way to solve the problem is by following fewer people, but then you might miss out on information you want or need. Here are some other ways to approach it:

Stop Following, Start Listing

If there are groups of Twitter feeds you want to keep track of (e.g. news feeds, other students at your school, people attending a given conference, local food trucks), but you dont want or need to see everything they say in your live stream, create a list of them and then span style=text-decoration: underline;unfollow those accounts/span. For example, you can see my list of News Feeds here.

Get started by clicking Lists/Create a List at the top of your Twitter stream, and then adding the accounts you want to follow in that List.

As you can see in the dialog box shown above, your list can be Public (anyone can follow your list and see whos on it), or Private (only you can see it). So if you dont want to cop to being interested in what a celebrity or pundit has to say, your secrets safe.

You dont need to reinvent the wheel, either. Check to see what lists other people have created. The public lists theyve made are shown on their Profile page, and you dont need to be following someone to follow their list. Feel free to follow someone elses list if it works for you, or to check out accounts on their lists if they look like theyd make an interesting addition to your own.

You can check your list(s) whenever you want to see what theyve tweeted recently, but you dont have to see it all in your Tweet stream. Most (if not all) 3rd party Twitter clients support Lists, so you can follow them using Tweetie as well, for example.

Save a Search

If you’re following some accounts because of a particular interest, save that interest as a search term. Enter the search term in the box on your Twitter home page; when the results appear, click on Save this search just above the results.

That will create a saved search listing for the term, which you can click on from Twitter and most (if not all) 3rd party Twitter clients anytime you want.

Check out NutshellMail

At last month’s Twiistup conference, I learned about a new product, NutshellMail, that I’ve been using ever since. NutshellMail aggregates the activity you specify – and emonly/em the activity you specify – from your social network accounts (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace), and emails a digest to you at the schedule of your choosing. In other words: your social media activity, in a nutshell.

With specific regard to Twitter, you can use it to keep up with your Twitter lists, saved searches, and much more. For example, it will also give you a list of new follows and people who have unfollowed you. You can have it sent to you once an hour or once a day; its up to you.

NutShell Mail is currently free, and it does require you to provide your username(s) and password(s) to access the account info for you, so proceed at your own risk. (emNote/em: I have no business or other relationship with NutshellMail. Im just a fan.) But its brilliant, particularly for times when you cant get to the services directly (e.g. youre behind a firewall that blocks access), and it will even let you take actions (e.g. following someone back, responding to a Facebook post) from within the email.

Et Voilà

Using any or all of these tips should let you cull your Tweet stream a bit (or perhaps significantly). I hope you find them helpful – please leave your own Twitter management tips in the comments.

First, the good.

• It makes the process of retweeting much easier. Just click a button. No need to copy/paste, no inadvertently omitting or misspelling the username of the person you’re RTing.
• It provides an easy way to evaluate the viral nature/popularity of a given tweet, by seeing how many times it’s been retweeted.
• It preserves the original author’s wording intact, mitigating against changed meanings, plagiarism and tweetjacking. (Although those inclined to do the latter probably won’t avail themselves of the RT function).
• It means you don’t have to truncate words or resort to netspeak abbreviations, since you don’t have to make room for the “RT @” bits.
• It restores some of the functionality we lost with the change to the @ mentions feature (see my post on this here). In other words, we used to be able to see all the tweets of anyone we followed in our stream, even if they were addressing or replying to someone we didn’t already follow. That was a useful way to find new people to follow, and a way to jump into conversations. Twitter changed that so we now only see a person’s replies if we also follow the person to whom they’re replying. With the new RT feature, we can now easily see tweets from the accounts that those people we follow find interesting. This re-opens the opportunity for us to enter conversations and discover new people to follow.

Now the not-so-good.

• It can be jarring to see posts from names we don’t follow in our tweet stream. Twitter would do well to make the name of the person doing the RTing more prominent.
• The RT function, as created organically by the Twitter population, provides for context. We can, given the available characters, add our own sentiment, or explain why we’re RTing. The new function removes that possibility.
• Not all 3rd-party apps can currently see RTs created using the RT button. Many of us use such apps, both on our desktops and mobiles, to access Twitter. That means we’re potentially missing out on important RTs, which are as likely to contain timely news and information as humor or shopping tips. It also means you can’t use the RT button while using those apps (although some, like TweetDeck and Tweetie, do provide easy ways to create RTs without having to copy/paste).

As with most things Twitter, the RT process will continue to evolve. It’s a function that was originated by the Twitter community itself, and it’s heartening to see the company respond by officially incporporating it to the service.

It is, if you will, a glamorized, organized version of the site’s ubiquitous “Follow Friday” meme, in which users recommend people for other users to follow.

Some seem to regard the Lists function with a combination of fear and contempt: that it will turn into a popularity contest of sorts; that the number of Lists on which one appears will become the new success metric.

However, I’d urge a second thought about spurning the feature, for these reasons:

1) It’s a tremendous educational tool. Think of those you admire who you follow on Twitter: artists, authors, experts, executives, journalists. We’re all lucky that (as fans, students, colleagues, competitors, whatever) we can – with a click – have access to a curated group of people they think enough of to add to a List.

2) Leave aside the potential clique-ish-ness of Lists, and think big. Think about making more connections in your world. For whatever your hobby, cause, or career, wouldn’t it be nice to find a List – or multiple Lists – of people you can follow, with a click, who share that interest? And who, once you follow the List and interact with those on it, may choose to follow you back?

3) Conversely, think about advancing your own hobby, cause or career. Do YOU follow a group of Tweeps because of their  field or area of interest? It’s probably taken you some time to cultivate that list. Share your expertise with the rest of us. It’s a generous thing to do, and it makes you look good in the process.

4) It makes it super-easy to do Follow Friday. Want to recommend everyone you follow who has a food blog? Those tweeps who share your love of horror films? Your collection of food trucks operating in L.A.? Make a List of ‘em, and Follow Friday the list address. No more worrying about forgetting someone, or about not having room for all the names.

One thing I’d like to see added to the feature: a brief (140 character, if need be!) explanation field so that one can, beyond the name, add some context to one’s Lists.

Will Lists cause some social fallout? Inevitably. Maybe someone you follow, whose blog you DON’T admire, will be put out at being excluded from your List. You may have to choose between 100% integrity on your List, and keeping the social peace. But in this way, online social life simply mirrors offline social life. We don’t all get invited to the party. We don’t all get the gig. That’s how it goes.

However:

In the end, everyone should use Twitter the way that works best for themselves. You don’t have to create any Lists, and you don’t have to follow any, either. I just wanted to state some cases for why Lists aren’t necessarily evil.

Many of us, especially in the earlier days of our Twitter membership, used this as a way to jump into conversations, and especially as a way to find new people to follow (“If my friend follows/chats with that person, I’ll check her stream and maybe follow her myself.”).

For technical and scalability reasons, Twitter changed that functionality earlier this summer. Now, you only see an account’s @replies if you also follow the person to whom the reply is directed.

Many people – myself included – were unhappy with this change. I felt that it would result in a bit of a Twitter echo-chamber, that I’d miss out on conversations, and that it would be more difficult to find interesting accounts to follow.

But lately I’ve reconsidered my unhappiness, and decided I rather like the new policy.

For one thing, I get many fewer tweets in my stream. I follow a few hundred accounts, which results in thousands of tweets per day, even under the new policy. I don’t get to read them all as it is. I’d get to read far fewer of them  if every tweet every one of my follows made every day was pushed to me.

The other thing, which I’ve grown to appreciate more, is that I can be a bit (only a bit, mind you) more relaxed about replies I make. Before, if I replied to someone, my tweet would go into the stream of the nearly-900 people who follow me, whether it was relevant to them in any way, or not. We’ve all experienced the joy of following someone who turns out to generate loads of trite or irrelevant tweets. They’re usually rewarded with an unf0llow.

Now, though, my replies only get seen by the person to whom they’re directed (if they check their @mentions!), and by anyone else who follows the both of us. The likelihood of my tweets being regarded as irrelevant is therefore greatly minimized.

And guess what: I haven’t had any trouble finding new people to follow. I check out the streams of the people who follow me. I check the streams of the people I follow, and see who they’re interacting with the most. I read “Follow Friday” and other recommendations. And if people want to include me in conversations, they direct a question to me or include my name in their tweet, so I see it in my @mentions.

So, my apologies to Twitter for my original castigation of their @reply policy change. I’ve grown to rather like it.

Your thoughts?