Another Rant From “Lefty”

I have managed, over the years, to stake out a bit of a reputation around my office as the guy who’s willing to wade knee-deep into the stuff nobody can quite get their heads completely around. That’s how I wound up, in large part, with the open source-related responsibilities that have been my main area of focus for the past several years.

Accordingly, I got a sort of a gift from my management going into 2010: I’m the official “social media” lead these days, and everyone’s looking to me to figure it out, for the most part. I’ve worked out a few things already, which I believe are helping me, and they might help you, too. Or I might be dead wrong. If so, let me know where you think I’ve gone off the tracks.

One of the keys to succeeding in Twitter, it seems to me—at least in my terms—is in building up first, a solid set of sources of useful and interesting information, and second, a body of folks who are interested in at least reading the things you find interesting, but also (ideally) getting into a more interactive “conversation” around those things.

I’ve come across some tools which, in combination, are proving to be very powerful.

First, Twitter lists. The first inclination I had was to follow everyone and everything that seemed interesting, useful or potentially worthwhile in some way. I now see this as an error. This is what lists are for. I can follow Ars Technica here, or Guy Kawasaki, or Bob Scoble until the cows come home, but it’s not going to make them interact with me. So, I created a list called “News Sources”, added them (and similar feeds and reflectors and such) to it. I can read them all without following a single one. If we do get into a conversation—as I have with a couple of high-profile folks already—I’ll follow them then (as I do with the folks I’ve mentioned). I’ve created similar, topical lists for various areas of interest, and will continue to do so, tinkering with them as need be. An excellent tool.

There’s a philosophical decision about whom one should actually follow. One extreme would seem to be, on the liberal side, to follow anyone who follows you. This ends up entailing a lot of maintenance, it would seem: do you still follow them if the unfollow you? The conservative extreme is to follow only those people you’ve actually met. I’d like to be somewhere in-between, a nice “Middle Way”: I want to follow those with whom I actually have meaningful and useful interactions.

So, second: I’ve found “Friend or Follow” to be very useful in managing folks who I wound up following who aren’t following me back. The display of such folks gives a useful pop-up showing when they last tweeted (so you can remove those who’ve wandered away) and the size of their following (which factors into my judgment on such things, other factors like interaction aside). If they’re interesting, but don’t follow me, I unfollow them and add them to a relevant Twitter list and read them there.

Third and fourth: The best analytical tools I’ve found so far are Twitalyzer and Klout. I use them to take a look at potentially interesting new followers to see if I want to follow them back. Judgments can be made on things like “engagement” and “generosity” on Twitalyzer, which provide an indication of how interactive they are, and how likely to retweet things; on Klout, similar judgments can be made from looking at the “True reach” score on the “Stats” tab. Klout has a nice feature in the form of a four-quadrant breakdown of tweeps into “Casuals”, “Climbers”, “Connectors” and “Personas”, based on audience size and influence. It’s a little rough-and-ready, but it seems pretty indicative, and seems to see through things like large follower counts which turn out to be mostly MLM marketers or bots.

Klout still has some rough edges: they have only added an “Update” capability within the past week, and the “Remember me” checkbox on the login form still doesn’t. That aside, I think it offers some useful capabilities, although at the moment, Twitalyzer is more full-featured.

It’s good—again in my view—to have a healthy follower-to-following relationship. In my terms, that means that (ideally) more people are following me than I’m following back. It’s the 80-20 rule: 20% of the people produce 80% of the valuable content. I want to follow—and interact with—that 20%. If you do, too, this should give you some ideas how to manage it.