How to Twitter
#FollowFriday
Twitter as a platform has carved a unique space in the social media landscape, with 140 character snippets dictating brevity and condensed prose. Used properly the service can offer a firehose exposure to new ideas, actionable insights, and avenues to penetrating a filter bubble. Unfortunately realizing this value is not a given. The platform has a notoriously poor on-boarding experience, especially for those with a poorly fleshed out social network going in. Although the service will provide some follow recommendations based on theme of content or proximity to an existing network, it is mostly left to the user to explore the seemingly infinite space of potential connections to seed their feed with input of value. This post will serve as a recipe for building a certain kind of experience on the network, mostly via negativa although there will be a few positive rules. There’s more than one way to skin a cat, and some people may prefer the common twitter punishment of celebrity worship, reactionary exclamations, self promotions, talking point echoes, frivolous distractions, or bad puns (actually there’s something to be said for bad puns, all puns are bad puns after all). This post will be directed at those who want something different, who prefer to eat healthier in their media diet.
The act of a twitter follow is not as trivial a thing as one might suppose. We are social animals, and we can’t help but take cues for our own attitudes, prejudices, and behaviors from those we surround ourselves with. The exposure to those in our feed is a subtle influence, especially considering the brevity of their input, but even raindrops can fill a swimming pool given enough time. Make no mistake, a twitter follow is a kind of commercial exchange, a bartering of slivers of attention. Some may offer in return information, amusement, or connections and friendship — each of these categories should be evaluated differently, with the lowest bar saved for those of the third category.
A common philosophy for populating a feed is a take one take all approach, all of Twitter welcome at your door, with follow counts approaching 4 or 5 figures scaled quickly. There are some advantages to this approach: as your follow counts climb, the allocation of attention to any undesirable few is diluted to a point of homeopathy, and one’s inspection of daily tweets transitions from a comprehensive review to merely dipping a cup in a flowing river. This dilution of individual voices means that your feed will sound more like a collective din, a hall of strange voices from unexpected directions via random sampling, allowing one to perform a kind of tomography on the distribution of public opinions. A problem with this approach is that there are some voices on the platform whose quality of contribution is well above that of the average user. By overwhelming your feed with noise, the signal from these high points will be lost among the others. This can be addressed by incorporating key accounts into separate lists for concentrated comprehensive attention, but have personally found that my appetite for the din is low enough that it’s not even worth that trouble, and thus prefer to primarily focus a feed with those with whom I don’t mind a more thorough exposure.
There are a few helpful rules that can come in handy for quickly evaluating a potential connection. None of these are hard rules, and they all have exceptions, but these can at least serve as guidelines subject to user discretion:
Number of tweets: a simple metric to quickly evaluate a user is number of posts. Those with post histories exceeding 20,000+ tweets are often like that overly talkative fellow that you meet at a party who dominates the conversation with his own strings of rumination and oversharing. For the collective din approach discussed in preceding paragraph this may be acceptable as these excessive posts will be diluted, however for any reasonable follow count it is best to avoid those most talkative unless they provide input of significant originality and value. A distinction should definitely be made between excessive posters with a high percentage of @ replies in their stream — as these won’t show up in your feed evidence of excessive conversations could negate a signal from high tweet count, and even better this demonstrates that these people may be interested in interactions from strangers such as yourself. Otherwise those who just record and broadcast every stray thought that occurs to them their oversharing has a tendency to dominate a feed and should be avoided.
Hashtags: a convention that arose from the user base ground up, the hashtag can be an indicator that a tweeter is hungry for attention. Incorporation into a few topical tweets or so can be disregarded, but a heavy concentration of the #’s is a red flag to avoid.
Professional Journalists: there will be exceptions, but the number of journalists worthy of following for their entire output is a short list. You may consider making exception for those who specialize in a particular niche of personal or professional interest, but even there I would recommend only letting in a select few. Twitter has a way of echoing and amplifying news of importance. While the Lindy effect is a method using the filter of time, a tuned twitter feed is a different kind of filter for finding news or ideas of interest. If you follow everyone in your industry then you will see every article and post, even those of little significance. Trust your network to amplify those messages of importance, otherwise you might as well just subscribe to every newspaper and be done with it.
Newspapers, magazines, and online news outlets: this is a much easier rule to codify. Journalism outlets have no place in a twitter stream. Scanning a collection of headlines on a newspaper homepage is a useful 30 seconds of your daily routine to get a feel for events of the day, but any duration beyond spent on a newspaper is time wasted. The concentration of journalism in a newspaper homepage makes for ease of scanning, but when you allow a newspaper to sprinkle random articles intermittently into your feed your comprehension time per headline goes way up, and you are thus allowing yourself to be distracted and your attention manipulated. The New York Times offers 10 free articles a month, helpfully providing a useful ceiling to newspaper browsing. If you’re clicking through to more than 10 articles a month from a newspaper, you’re probably doing it wrong. For my personal feed I make few exceptions such as for The Economist magazine, primarily because I like their treatment of select current events as a delayed but succinct authoritative summary, limited to news of high importance.
Politicians: they are on this platform for one reason alone, to posture to voters, and can thus be safely ignored. Let their legislation, appointees, and success dealing with foreign governments speak for themselves, everything else is just marketing. That is not to say that you should avoid interacting with politicians, just like a phone call to your local senator can signal an interest of their constituency, tweeting an official is another approach (just a drop but drops can add up), however if its important enough to attempt influence a phone call or letter is probably more effective than a tweet unless you’re trying to get on public record.
Trolls: this should be obvious but some tweeters will attempt to garner attention by touching on trigger points, name calling, picking fights, or other avenues of obnoxiousness. It is ok to start arguments or call out bullshitters when there is a moral element at play. Nitpicking is not bad in moderation but excessively it is annoying. Other types of confrontation are usually evidence of attention seeking behavior which should be avoided. Evidence of trolling should be addressed quickly with an unfollow or even a block. That being said trolling is a good quality for those looking to serve in public office and demonstrates capacity for inspired leadership.
The rules presented so far have been via negativa, or describing what a good twitter feed is not. Here in last few points I’ll offer a looser criteria that makes a twitter follow worthwhile. The interpretation of this features will not necessarily be as obvious, but that is ok otherwise a prescriptive list would apply equally to everyone, and diversity is a public good.
Agenda: Every user will have an agenda, when evaluating try to look for patterns in messaging to demonstrate. Some agendas to avoid include attention seeking or commercial promotion. Those best suited are seeking to establish credibility or have a genuine interest in uncovering and distributing ideas of importance, sharing nuggets of inspiration, or offering slivers of entertainment. Good indicators include those who engage in philosophical debate, those who confront people above their station for moral purposes instead of for attention (speaking up to power is more noble than speaking ill to those less fortunate), another quality indicator is engaging in public writings or podcasts on other platforms for purposes other than current events journalism.
Diversity: A well-tuned feed is more than just a collection of individual voices, done properly it is a chorus of different styles and fortes. A filter bubble is best avoided by intentionally including voices from different industries, backgrounds, or generations for instance. It is also wise to incorporate some lighthearted tones to offset those more serious. Diversity is a key ingredient for avoiding a filter bubble.
Randomness: don’t be afraid to follow seemingly random people at times, a low risk experiment that can be easily reversed should a connection prove distracting.
Tribe: Search for a community, it doesn’t matter how loose-knit, of those less mainstream who may share common interests or philosophies. This group is necessary as a sanity check, sounding board, or source of potential friendship.
These have just been a few suggestions for tuning a twitter feed to its potential. Note that this is primarily advice on whom to follow instead of how to generate followers of your own — the latter of which I don’t have a clue.
For further readings please check out my Table of Contents, Book Recommendations, and Music Recommendations.
Albums that were referenced here or otherwise inspired this post:
Every Open Eye — Chvrches
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