Celebrate good times, come on!!!

Birthday Cake by Theresa Thompson on Flickr via CC license.

So….

I’ve finally reached my Twitter goal from Week 1 of ANZ 23 Mobile Things to get down to 1000 following!!!

Here is the screenshot to prove it:

So I am pretty stoked to finally be here; it was a hard goal to reach – halving the amount of people I was following, but I have done it now! Phew… Now to catch up with my Week 3 post 🙂

“Listless” but OK; how I’m solving my Twitter problem.

Thanks everyone for your thoughts on my Twitter dilemma; I have since followed up on many of your helpful suggestions as you can see from the results below:

So I’m now down to 1480 from 2001 – only another 480 odd to reach my goal of 1000 following! Woo-hoo!

How did I do this?

Jan Holmquist’s suggestion of ManageFlitter – http://manageflitter.com/ – was inspired; it’s a great way to break down who you are following. It breaks down who you are following by the following filters:

• Not following back
• No profile image
• Fake following
• Non-English
• High Ratio
• Inactive
• Talkative
• Quiet

These are very useful to evaluate who you are following and to see the characteristics of the groups. As I prefer to follow people who interact, I choose to unfollow all the inactive accounts I was following (those people that have not tweeted in the last 30 days). This was an easy way to clear about 100 inactive accounts off my list.

As I am using a free account, I can only unfollow 100 people per day within the filter. Hence I have been going back over several days to get down this low and will continue to use this tool to tidy up my Twitter account.

I also have browsed through my list of following on Twitter to see if I can identify any rogue accounts that I didn’t mean to follow and have managed to find a few this way.

My main aim at this stage is to get my following down to a manageable level so I am pruning quite heavily. I don’t stress too much about the unfollow decisions as I know I can easily go back and follow people again if I accidentally unfollowed someone that I do want to follow.

One concern I had was that I might loss a number of followers by this drastic spring clean, but any followers I have lost has been negated by some new followers I have gained this week. In fact, I think the number following me has actually increased (but this might not be related to my spring clean :D). Just a shout-out to all who are following me; a big thank you and I hope I continue to share content that is of interest to you. But if I don’t, or I start to annoy you with frequent tweeting, feel free to unfollow me – I understand 😀

So did I set up any lists?

I’ve set up a couple of private lists for people that I wasn’t sure about unfollowing completely. I will continue to evaluate these lists to see if I need to follow more people or create separate lists based on topics of interest.

What have I learned from this week?

I’ve learned a lot from this week actually. Using this week to focus on Twitter allowed me to:

• Think more deeply about the type of people I’d like to follow and interact with
• Evaluate the different types of accounts I am following and become more aware on my PLN
• Tidy up my account so I have a more manageable feed and can interact more with those I am following
• Discover a way to add another account to my Twitter app on the iPad so I can switch between using my personal account – @ajwillemse91 – and the ANZ 23 mobile things – @anz23mthings – with the click of a button! Very handy – only I have occasionally tweeted from the wrong account but am working on ironing that one out!

What have you learned about Twitter this week?