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As I've said before, I think Twitter is a tremendously valuable resource, for everyone. It is a wealth of information I would not have had otherwise, it is a great platform for networking with like-minded users and it can be a great place to grow your business.
That said, it's not all rainbows and puppy dogs in Twitterland. It can be filled with spam, attention hogs and information overflow. Here are some of things I have learned to streamline and enhance my Twitter experience that I hope will make your Twitter experience a great one;
A large following does not necessarily mean a valuable Twitterer.
Some of the people I get great value from, have the same number of followers as people who are clearly using lame tactics to amass followers and are only there to promote themselves.
Don't pay any attention to your follower numbers and don't follow people purely in hopes that they will return the favor. A large, irrelevant network is pointless. A few hundred followers who are engaged and interested in what you have to say are far more valuable to you than 20,000 who have no similar interests.
Only follow people who can add some bit of value to your world. The same goes for re-following people who have followed you. There's a 75% chance that person is barely aware that they followed you, much less has anything in common with you.
Your network will grow organically with useful people, and whether you heed this advice now or not, at some point you will wish you did. All of those meaningless followers just degrade your interactions with the useful ones and add tons of background noise, which is something we could all use less of.
> 100 followers? Get TweetDeck and learn to use the filters!
Even if you do a great job of only making meaningful connections on Twitter, you are quickly going to end up with more updates than you can realistically sort through. It will become difficult to find the useful posts among the hundreds or thousand you will get in a day.
TweetDeck, which is a desktop program that displays your various Twitter messages, has a handy tool which allows you to create groups of users which are displayed in their own area.
Using this feature, you can create a group of those users who add the most value. This is where you will find my favorite blog authors, close friends, and those who are better than me in any area I want to improve (@Tony Robbins, @Tim Ferriss, @Guy Kawasaki, @Mari Smith, etc.). These are the posts I am excited to read and the people I have meaningful interaction with.
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