Insight, advice, news and chit chat

Twitter Etiquette: Am I tweeting too much? When someone gets annoyed with seeing your name in their timeline too often.

People use Twitter in different ways. Some use it mainly for conversation, networking and keeping in touch with people. Some people retweet a lot. Some people share a lot of links to content and blogs (also known as “content curation”. Some also share links to their own content. I personally do a mixture of all these things. And I tweet quite often – perhaps 15 times a day.
I recently got a tweet from one of my followers. It pains me to have to share this, but for the purpose of education and to prove to you how “grown up” I am – I felt I must, so as to put context in this story.

How often do I tweet?

With the help of my favourite social media sharing app, Buffer, I tweet about once an hour. Many of my followers follow more than a 1000 active tweeters, so for them I wont be showing up too often, but it increases my tweets’ chances of being seen.
By tweeting often, I also have a higher chance of people seeing my tweets, sharing them and more poeple finding me and looking at my Twitter stream, and then following me.
However in this case I wanted to provide my Twitter friend Mike a solution – I didn’t want to annoy him.

2 Solutions to seeing me too often in your Timeline.

So here’s what I suggested, and I will suggest it to you as well since you too may find someone you follow is just “Tweeting too much”.

Solution 1: Follow Twitter SuperUsers

These are people who tweet often, have a lot of followers, share a lot of links. By following them, you dilute the amount of times you see me (or someone you feel is “over-tweeting”). You may find your Twitter stream becomes more interesting and like me you just feel every time you look at Twitter you get an abundance of interesting things and new potential to learn and share. So exciting!

A small selection of Twitter SuperUsers

Diana Adams (@adamsconsulting)
Michael Q Todd (@mqtodd)
A.R.Karthick (@arkarthick)
Ann Tran (@AnnTran_)
Ruhani Rabin (@ruhanirabin)
LoriMoreno (@LoriMoreno)
Jessica Stillman (@EntryLevelRebel)
Sarah-Jayne Gratton (@@grattongirl)
Sean Gardner (@2morrowknight)
Pam Moore (@PamMktgNut)
Lori McNee (@lorimcneeartist)

Solution 2: Twitter Lists (it’s GENIUS!)

If you find that by following these and other Twitter power users, there is still the same problem (with them too) you can unfollow anyone who you feel is too much, and put them into a Twitter list.
Twitter Lists are a great way to organise the people on Twitter into groups. It’s (and here’s a grand statement) the one thing that divides social media casual users to strategically savvy pros. To add someone to a list, you click on their name and then where you see the little man icon with the down arrow next to it, click on that and choose “add or remove from lists…”. From there, you can either add someone to one or more any existing list, or create new lists by clicking “Create a list”.
Some example ways you could group people into lists

  • Industry specific categories (eg I have lists of Photographers, IFAs, Interior Designers and Wedding Planners)
  • How you know them (eg Folks I know In Real Life, Clients, People who came to seminars, Prospects). For the most part, I would keep these ones as private lists.
  • Specific groups of cool tweeters (here is where you could put me and other people who share good content regularly)

Whatever you do with your lists, you will be able to click on the list page from your own profile page, or use Tweetdeck/Hootsuite to create collumns out of the lists, so you can easily see tweets from those groups of people. Viewing tweets in this way, in groups of people classified by some sort of similarities, means you can be far more focused on who to watch, who to interact with, who to RT and who to suggest meeting up with. And that’s what makes Twitter so magical!
 

Leave a comment

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>