It's been nearly a month since I wrote about my Twitter clearance and the lessons contained therein, but I'm still trimming the fat and still learning what I need out of Twitter. I've come to the conclusion that I needed to pretty much just start over with that account. There's just far too much noise over there and there are some accounts that I'd love to keep following, but their post volume makes it impossible. I started out with over 300 accounts that I followed. I am now down around 46 and may continue to trim as I watch my feed and sift out the accounts that are really valuable to me. At some point, I'm sure I'll start rebuilding it. But I've got to figure out what I want out of this account first. Who am I trying to connect with? I don't really have a solid answer to that question right now.
I manage five different Twitter accounts. One of them is my jewelry account (@gaiasjewel). Another is for my writing personality, while a third one is for the people I know and keep up with on a personal basis (one I don't want associated with my business personalities). A fourth is a placeholder for a future venture and finally, there's a joke account I maintain which shall remain nameless. For the last two, I do not keep up with a feed nor do I follow any of those who follow me. The fourth one I listed may only have four or so tweets associated with it. I might post once a month to the joke account, but the first three are my active ones and I'm trying to find a balance between them.
I read an article the other day about how the Dunbar Number still holds true in this era of social networking. They had interviewed Robert Dunbar and got his thoughts on how social media, specifically Facebook, affected his original findings. For those not familiar with his findings, he's a social anthropologist who discovered that a human brain can only track so many friends at a given time (thought to be around 150, though a specific number has never been settled on). Any people above and beyond that number become sort of fringe acquaintances. They're not people you'd do favors for or talk to on a regular basis. They're people you probably categorize and group in order to track them.
A short interview with Robert Dunbar and how I'm applying his findings after the jump.
I think I'm proving this with my culling of Twitter accounts I follow. All totaled, there are 207 accounts that I follow on Twitter between the three accounts of mine that I consider active. Of those, I'm sure there's a good 50 or so who do not post regularly enough for me to consider myself to be tracking them. And of the remaining, let's say 150 accounts, there are probably 75 more I'd consider myself to not be personally connected to. Add in the people that I associate with in "real life", close friends, family members, et cetera and you'd probably get something around that 150 number, if not a little lower because I'm an introvert and the world's worst person when it comes to keeping up with my family. (Note to self: call dad, email grandma.)
And so, when I looked at a Twitter feed full of fringe acquaintances, I just tuned them out completely rather than trying to sift through the noise to find the gems.
In other related news, I think I've found that service I turned on to automatically subscribe to followers (SocialOomph it is now called, after a couple of name changes, I believe) and it does appear to still be working. At least now I can turn it off and since I'm down under 50 accounts, it's easier to keep a watchful eye on that sort of thing.
Now to just figure out what the hell I want out of this and I'll be golden.
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