Do You Have a Problem with Twitter Noise?

Personally I don’t get it. I see people complaining a lot about the “signal-to-noise-ratio” on Twitter and just finished reading yet another blog post explaining how to deal with it. The funny thing is that the post was written by someone who admitted that he only has 100 followers, so he doesn’t even know what noise is yet.

I currently have 2825 followers and I don’t have a problem with noise. Of course I’m not even what you’d call a power user. There are lots of people with tens of thousands of followers and they’ve all found ways to deal with the noise.

For me it’s simple and won’t take a 3-page blog post to cover. I keep Twhirl open on one of my monitors all the time while I’m using my computer. I have Twhirl set to update all tweets every 2 minutes and depending on the time of day there will be anywhere from 30 to 100 or more new tweets every two minutes. Obviously no one could keep up with that many tweets for long, so I simply glance at the stream once in a while to see if a tweet jumps out at me that I want to reply to. Otherwise, I only pay close attention to my @replies and DMs (direct messages) since I usually only get a handful of those an hour. To make it easy, I have a chime set to alert me every time I receive an @reply or DM.

I’ve also seen people (mostly newbies) complaining about some of the people they follow taking over their Twitter stream because they tweet many times an hour. The reason I say newbie is because that is only obvious to someone who is following very few people and has one Twiva in the mix. If you follow a few close friends who only tweet once or twice a day and also follow @GuyKawasaki, yes, it’s going to seem like your stream has been hijacked by Guy. However, once you get to the point that you’re following lots of people, many of whom tweet often, you will no longer notice one person seemingly monopolizing the stream.

If you’re an uber geek you might also want to use the groups and category features in TweetDeck to follow people or topics you find particularly interesting closely and then keep half an eye on everyone else, but I’ve never found that approach particularly useful since I find most of the people I follow interesting at least once in a while.

So, stop whining about how you can’t follow more than 20 people or you’ll lose your mind and start using Twhirl or TweetDeck and concentrate on the @replies and DMs and only follow the stream when you’ve got some time to kill.