Twitter clearance with an unexpected lesson.

Last week, I spent some time cleaning out the Twitter accounts I follow. A long time ago, when I thought I knew what I was doing with this whole social networking thing, I had set up a thing to follow back anyone who followed me after a three day review period. In that review period, I was supposed to go to this site and look through the accounts that had followed me recently and weed out the ones I didn't want to follow. The rest would be automatically followed. I don't even remember now where I set this up, nor do I think it's still working. Needless to say, I no longer believe this is a good strategy and if I can remember the site, I'm going to go turn this feature off if I see it's still working.

I have several Twitter accounts because I have several ventures and then there's my personal one where I keep track of the people I know. The truth of it is, I just can't keep up with much more than about 150 accounts for each of my accounts. I had racked up something approaching 400 follows on my jewelry account and many of them I just wasn't interested in reading.

As I started to go through my list, I began to notice I had unwittingly created a set of mental rules for weeding out the accounts I wanted to keep versus the ones I culled.

1. Fellow artisans - When I first started with this, I followed a lot of my fellow artisans in solidarity. But that's not helpful to either one of us really, unless we're doing very different work from each other. I might continue to follow some of my favorite knitters because I love their work and I don't knit myself. But I realized that unless a jewelry artist posts things that interest me (not just links to new listings or notes about promotions and such), there's really no point in me following.
2. Nothing but marketing - Twitter is an excellent marketing tool, I get that. But if you're not connecting with your readers, they're going to become disengaged very quickly. I can't tell you how many accounts I weeded out that were nothing but long lists of automated links to their new Etsy/Artfire listings. You've got to mix it up and become a part of the discussion. I'd say a good rule of thumb would be to make marketing about 30% of your posts. Any more than that, and you're going to start sounding like a constant commercial and people tend to ignore commercials.
3. Posting frequency/infrequency - Okay, I know I let my account slide for a very long time and so I'm kind of the pot calling the kettle black here. But I also know that I lost a bunch of followers in that time. As I went through my list, I began to weed out any that hadn't posted a single time yet this year. I was surprised by the number of accounts that I actually remembered being very active that hadn't posted since 2009. But the other end of the spectrum got cut as well. If I'm stretched so thin I can only follow 150 or so accounts, I'm not going to be able to follow a single account that tweets every 30 seconds. I'm sorry, no one's life is so fascinating that they have something valid to say that often. Find some middle ground and have something worth saying. If it's something very run of the mill, like dropping your kids off to school or watching your cat sleep, it better be written in an interesting or witty way.
4. Suppliers - Now, on this one, I may have to make another pass. I kept most anyone selling jewelry supplies that didn't fall into one of the above categories. But once I get another free day (yeah right), I'm going to go through that list and visit their sites to see which ones I'd actually consider buying from.
5. Overall snapshot of information - As much as we'd love to take in all their is to know about the things that interest us, we only have so much time to keep up with this stuff before it begins to eat into our productivity. So as much as I'd love to follow 20 blogs from creative career coaches, I probably only have time to read one or two. Likewise with Twitter. I only have so much room for each area of interest before everything gets too clogged to read any of it.

This gave me some insight, from a reader's standpoint, on how I should use my own account. I took a look at each account I followed, their profile and their last three tweets to make my decisions. As I started to notice these things recurring in my decisions, I started to think about what might make readers keep my account in their follow lists and what might make them decide to cut me loose. Right now, I can't say I'm providing much of anything that would really persuade anyone to keep me on. But I hope as I get back into the work itself, there will be more worthwhile things to post.