Twitter can be a simply incredible communication & marketing tool,  offering what can only be described as an unparalleled mechanism for communicating with your customers or readers.

It’s somewhat comical however just how quickly some things can change from being exceptionally helpful, to becoming an ongoing challenge in terms of sorting the wood from the trees – with useful or interesting tweets quickly being lost under a sea of tweets you’re simply not interested in whatsoever.

In the early days of using Twitter, most people tend to follow anyone who looks interesting or perhaps operates in a similar field to themselves; invariably leading to ending up following a couple of hundred other people of which you perhaps only ever read tweets from 50-100 or so….

The vital question is of course, how best to approach this?

First step would seem to be obvious: review your followers and unfollow anyone who’s tweets you always ignore. May be an obvious step but unless you’re actively thinking about it, it’s highly unlikely that you’re going to instantly unfollow someone the first time you ignore a tweet… Often some milage here for a quick win…

In my case this didn’t help much, perhaps only accounting for 5 or 6 accounts.

Next step seems equally obvious: unfollow anyone who’s not actually still using Twitter, unless of course you feel a need to keep following them for some reason?

Once these two are done, if you’re still not happy with the volume of tweets you’re seeing then it’s time for somewhat more drastic action – go through the users’s you’re following and think about why you’re following them. If you’re wondering why, and can’t see a reason for keeping them… Unfollow!

A good tool to help in this process seems to be Tweepi – allows you to search/filter/review the users you’re following along with getting quick access to stats about when they last tweeted and tools to follow/unfollow.

Your mileage may vary somewhat but hopefully you’re now only seeing content you’re actually interested in seeing – may well just make Twitter more useful to you on a daily basis 🙂