There are a few different approaches you can take to using Twitter. One is to just get all the Twitter followers you can, regardless of who they are or what they do. Another is to be selective, and only follow those who belong to a very narrow niche. My wife is an example of the latter. Our daughter has a particular medical condition, so my wife uses her Twitter account to communicate with a very small group of doctors and other concerned individuals who deal with the same situation. Me personally, I’m in the middle. I have not done the things to generate tens of thousands of users, but I have also used some automation to build up a follower list, while concentrating on those who deal with marketing, especially legal marketing.
But even taking the middle ground and only dealing with a couple thousand followers, it can be difficult to manage. I mean, you can’t really sit around all day and do nothing but read peoples’ tweets (unless you’re already wealthy and really don’t have anything else to do). For most of us, there is just too much to do. On the other hand, you really need to at least scan through what the people you follow are saying.
One tool for pulling this off is TweetDeck. TweetDeck is a client side program (meaning you install it on your computer, versus running it from a web site) that presents your Twitter information in a nicely laid out, organized way using columns. By default, the tweets from all of your friends are listed in a column on the left-hand side of the screen (although columns can be moved around however you want). The next column lists tweets that mention your user name. The third column lists direct messages. The last column, by default, shows TweetDeck recommendations, which I found to be a waste of space. I use that column to build out groups.
The ability to lump those you follow into groups is an extremely useful function. The fact is, if you take the steps to build up a large list of people you follow (and who follow you), there are going to be a lot of people that you’re really not that interested in reading. Likewise, there are going to be some people who you really want to keep up with. The way to account for this is to place those you really want to read into groups. For instance, in my account, I have a group called “Legal Marketing” that contains users who discuss, well, legal marketing. I have other groups devoted to other areas of Internet marketing. If I did not have these people grouped, their tweets would just be mixed in with all the other tweets of people I follow and I would not see nearly as many of them.
You may choose to use groups differently, instead just grouping anyone you find interesting regardless of their line of work or the nature of their tweets. That is fine. But however you do it, you should find a way to organize your Twitter account so that you don’t drown in a sea of random tweets.