I’m often asked how I follow 2900 people on Twitter. You can’t read that much! Sorry you 2900, but I don’t read all your tweets. Nor does anyone who follows a lot of people.

So what do I read, and how?

First of all, life is too short to read old tweets. So anything written now, while I’m writing this blog entry, or you’re reading it, I won’t look at. Except mentions (tweets mentioning @jonworth) – I’ll read all of those, always.

Secondly, I don’t use twitter.com to manage my account. I use Tweetdeck for Chrome, although regular Tweetdeck or Hootsuite will do the job just as well. These are the only Twitter Clients I’ve come across that give a decent overview of Twitter lists, and also explain why Tweetdeck is a valuable firm just now. No-one using Twitter effectively and professionally is going to be using the regular Twitter website, it just does not offer adequate functionality.

Thirdly, group the people you follow into lists. There are practical guides about how to do this from Mashable and Twitter itself. But why should you do this?

Think of the things that matter to you. For me that’s UK Politics, EU Politics and how tech impacts politics. Depending on the time of day, or the day of the week, my interests will vary. If it’s a European Council in Brussels my focus will be on EU. If it’s budget day it will be the UK. If I’m looking for inspiration on web projects then it will be tech.

So think of your interests, and work out who the really interesting people are on Twitter in those areas, and make a list for each.

For example my techpolitics list has 34 members (you can see their tweets here), the UK list 66 and so on. The total on all my lists is a couple of hundred. Anyone I follow will be considered for a list, but not that many make it. You can also see that while 3300 people follow me, 238 have listed me – i.e. 238 people who have gone beyond the basics of Twitter are really paying attention.

Last but not least, get an overview of your lists in Tweetdeck or Hootsuite. This is shown in the screenshot above – you can display each list in a separate column, giving you an overview of what’s happening on all of your lists, whenever you want it. This is much better than the separate clicks you have to make in most Twitter clients, or at twitter.com. You can also make columns for Twitter searches, although that’s a topic for another post.

So – in short – work out your interests, make a list for each, add columns in Tweetdeck or Hootsuite, and enjoy a busy but manageable experience with Twitter!

My response to the consultancy firm was that there are 2 aspects of any good Twitter strategy: to generally follow all the people that follow you, and to use a software tool for Twitter (like Tweetdeck, Nambu, Tweetie) rather than the web interface.

I was therefore rather surprised to see some very prominent speakers at PdF Europe (such as Andrew Rasiej, Ellen Miller and Joe Rospars but they are not the only ones) who don’t even get close to the idea of following even a significant proportion of the people that follow them. I tweeted this observation and this post is the longer follow-up.

As far as I’m concerned the bottom line is this: if someone is interested enough in you to follow you, then at least follow them back. You can even automate this with Socialtoo.com. You can always then chose to unfollow the person, and you have to remember that all followers are equal, but some are more equal than others.

Essentially I can never read all the tweets of the currently 1231 people I follow, but I do look through that list regularly and have discovered interesting new people. However thanks to Nambu I can organise my followers into groups and make sure I keep an eye on the tweets of a core group of people who are especially relevant to my working environment. On the Twitter web interface lists can be used for the same purpose. So @Nosemonkey I’m afraid your critique doesn’t hold. Equally it’s possible to use a tool like Seesmic as a web-based alternative to Twitter.com.

There are of course plenty of valid reasons to not follow people (or in my case un-follow them) – they are spammers, they just tweet too much, or they persistently tweet in languages I do not understand or about topics it turns out I have no interest in. So @JulienFrisch I agree with you.

But none of those reasons are – in my mind – adequate justification for not following the people that follow you and giving them the benefit of the doubt, at least at the start.

[UPDATE] Please note I don’t have any experience with Seesmic.com as I always have my laptop or iPhone with me (for Nambu / Tweetdeck for iPhone). There are other web based Twitter clients such as TwitHive, TwitIQ and gtwit. Also note that Socialtoo.com has an anti-spam feature to make sure you’re not auto-following spam-bots.