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Do you Tweet? Do you have a lot of Tweeps? Whether you've been on Twitter since its beginnings in 2006 or you're a Twitter neophyte, it doesn't take too long to find out that keeping up with your Twitter feed can be overwhelming. Twitter is such a simple concept: micro-blogging with the occasional link or photo thrown in. You start out following your friends and family to keep up with their goings-on. Of course, Twitter isn't just about people that you already know; these days, nearly every celebrity has a Twitter account, too, as a way to interact with their fans. Following a celebrity can be a lot of fun. All kinds of businesses, from your local dentist to international retail chains, also have Twitter accounts. Some of them use their accounts to share special discounts or inside info, so you'll probably add lots of them, too. Many of these people and businesses don't just Tweet once a day, but once an hour -- or even more often.
Then there's the option of following specific topics. If you follow everything and everyone that you find interesting, you can end up with hundreds and hundreds of Tweets showing up in your feed on a daily basis. How can you possibly hope to keep up? Being overwhelmed has led many a formerly Twitter-happy person to abandon the service altogether. Not only does Twitter offer you ways to make it easier to keep up, there are also lots of different tools and programs available. Whether you want to read your feed on your phone or your desktop PC, you can streamline things and actually enjoy using Twitter again. Read on to find out how to manage your Twitter feed, starting with working the tools on the Web site. Following one person or business usually leads you to others, and Twitter helpfully makes suggestions for you based on what the people you follow are following. Then when somebody begins following you, you may feel compelled to follow them as well.
Before you know it, you're scrolling through your feed looking for the people, businesses and topics that most interest you and trying to keep up with the action. It's important to note that unlike with other social media sites, you aren't becoming "friends" with somebody when you choose to follow their Tweets. If someone is following you but you don't see anything particularly fascinating about their feed, don't add them back. Conversely, if you're following someone who doesn't follow you or interact with you in any way, feel free to delete them. You may also want to set a limit on how many people that you're willing to follow; that way if you want to add somebody new, you'll have to make room first. That way, only people that you approve can read your Tweets, which will automatically limit the number of re-Tweets and direct messages that you'll receive. You may also think twice about following everyone who wants to follow you since you have to approve them first.
If you're using your Twitter account to interact with a business or a celebrity, making your feed private won't allow you to reply to them or direct your Tweets to them using hashtags. If your feed is out of control, though, it's an easy way to scale back. Twitter has a useful management feature that many people don't fully take advantage of: lists. Lists operate like filters. You can assign every account on your feed to a list, and then use the lists to read your feed by priority or look for something specific. For example, create a "family" feed so you can just see what those people are up to if you don't have time to read your entire feed. Just click on the silhouette icon in each account's profile, drop down to "add to list" and start forming your lists. You can also save searches and then use them when you want to find out what people are saying about a specific topic.
If limiting your followers or creating lists isn't helping you manage your Twitter feed, next we'll look at how you can use other applications to do it. With that many apps, how do you know which ones can best help you manage your feed? Let's start with the most popular ones available. One common type of app for Twitter is the browser-based dashboard, or client. These programs interface with Twitter and allow you to do everything that you can from Twitter's site. The difference is that you can organize your feed to fit your needs. These programs do a lot more than just help you manage your Twitter feed, but we'll focus on those specific features here. It's available for Windows 7, Mac OS and Linux, as well as iPhones, iPads and Android phones. All you have to do is download it for your platform, log in to Twitter and get to organizing. TweetDeck is column-based; you can create columns for each of your lists, trends that you're following, saved searches, and direct mentions.
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