Welcome to the series Sunday Social Networking Tips. The plan is to bring in folks to share their best ideas about social networking. The next person to write up a tip could be you!
Today’s tip is just focused on Twitter.
Tip:
Eliminate the spammers, MLM, and get rich/followers/beauty quicker crowd
Most of you know I’m a big fan of using a Twitter client. All of the clients out now support some form of searching. A few of them also include the ability to filter a given column or set of Twitter messages.
I’ve been using these filters and searches to find specific tweets within those posted by my friends messages, a way to find just the posts on origami for example. But what I hadn’t thought of doing is using search to stop following folks.
Kevin Cottrell, @kevincottrell, shared a primo idea during our Bring a Tweep to Lunch outing the other day. He suggested adding a filter of negative words. The search would be on things such as p0rn, MLM, and so on.
You ask why right? The idea is that those are folks he’s not interested in really following. It gives a quick way to just click and unfollow. Immediately the amount of those tweets will drop.
For me that would make a significant dent. I don’t autofollow folks, but I do follow back a fair amount of decent prospects. There is always some that slip through that really send the most annoying tweets.
Why does it matter? It matters because it floods the stream and crowds out the messages I’d prefer to see.
So the tip is try negative word filters against the tweets you follow and see what you find to screen out.
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I've been getting a bit more aggressive at un-following those that really get irritating. As you say here, the stream gets really gunked up with uninteresting tweets and forces you to do all your tweeting on a client if you want any chance of catching folks that are really interesting or that you are conversing with. Filtering out for key-words sounds interesting, but I find that folks who tend towards that kind of spam also send tweets with links that don't give you much warning of what is on the other side.
- spam
- offensive
- disagree
- off topic
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