Tag: twitter

Twitter is a great social media platform, and your timelines stay relevant depending on how much you tweak the list of people you follow.  I primarily use Twitter to read content that others have curated and reviewed.  It saves me a lot of time and points me to a lot of content I didn’t know existed.

One of the problems with Twitter is that over time, your timeline may be flooded because you are following people you no longer need to.  It is easy to get inundated with content on Twitter and therefore optimizing your timeline by pruning the list of people you follow is as important as spring cleaning.  Many “influencers” will follow you in an attempt to get you to follow them back.  Then over time, they will unfollow you leaving you with their content to read while they never read the thoughts you share.  Waning interests, changing hobbies, old technologies being replaced with new ones, stale accounts, decommissioned handles are all the more reason to keep tidying up the list of people you follow.

Here is a tool and data approach I take to clean up the people I follow regularly.

Here are some tricks I utilize to extract some insights from the Twitter CLI dumps:

Leaders are the accounts I follow but they don’t follow back.  I have found that pruning this list keeps my timeline sane.

t leaders lists the leaders who you follow.

   Since Last tweeted at Tweets Favorite  Listed Following Followers  

    ...

t leaders -l -a -s=tweeted

The above command will give you all leaders and the time since they tweeted in sorted order. Leaders who have not tweeted in a while are good candidates to unfollow.  You will find them on the top of your list.

t leaders -l -a -s=tweets

The above command will list all leaders with their tweet count in sorted order.  In this list, look towards the top and the bottom of the list.  The top will have leaders who have not tweeted much and the bottom has those who tweet a bit too much. Pruning by unfollowing from either ends of the list will help you cleanup your feed.

t leaders -l -a |grep -i "moved\|no longer\|instead"

The above command will list a few potential Twitter handles that are no longer used.  You need to review the list and if some handles have moved, it is a good idea to clean them up.

t leaders -l -a -c >out.csv

The above command will output the leader list in CSV (comma separated value) format.  You can then open the file in a spreadsheet program to slice and dice it further.  For example, you can view only the leaders who are not verified accounts.  You are most likely to find a few accounts in this list you’d want to unfollow.

Unlike other social media types, Twitter needs regular pruning for it to continue to be a useful medium for curated content.  Cleanup keeps the content relevant and meaningful thereby reducing the signal to noise ratio.

Introduction

Twitter is an indispensable tool that keeps you up to date with the latest trends and news in your domain of work.  I’ll be using my blog to share a few tips and tricks I have learnt over the years.

Tweets are a steady flow of  unscheduled packets of information on your timeline and it is not always possible to read every  single one of them.   Unlike an email inbox, it is best to discard unread tweets if you are unable to view tweets for a couple of days.

There are always some Twitter accounts you’d like to track

There are a few accounts whose tweets you may not want to miss even when you don’t  have time to monitor your twitter account.

For example, I like to follow tweets from  –

1. The company’s twitter account  (or sub account) to stay tuned with the business and RT if something catches my eye.
2. All team members who I work closely with.
3. All accounts that use twitter to alert their customers about delays / failures  in their service or have breaking  announcements. These are super critical alerts I care about such as delays on my commute routes, security alerts for software I care about, etc.
4. Tweets from close friends and family with whom I like to interact with.

Mobile Notifications

This is where Twitter’s mobile notification feature comes handy.

• Turn on notifications and get alerts on your mobile phone whenever the account you care about tweets. Twitter will send regular mobile alerts on your smart phone and these alerts are *not* sent as SMS messages.
• You will be notified on your phone / tablet  and you can immediately read the tweet and react to it.
• The notifications are sent even if you were not mentioned in the tweet.
• In order to use this feature, you should be following the person for whom you’d like to set an alert.

The image below shows how to turn on mobile notifications for accounts you follow.  Click it to view in a new window.

I have been using this feature ever since it was launched.  It helps prioritize tweets you want to read without the fear of following too many people or being away from your twitter account.

So if you are looking for some sanity within the chaos called Twitter, this is a must have feature that you should try out.