Overwhelmed by the Network? Simple Filters Will Help
Feeling overwhelmed by the firehose of the Internet, and especially social networks? Before bailing out, see if you can’t make some simple steps to filter out the noise. It’s easier than you may think. If you can get it right, you can get all the upside, with very little downside.
Twitter gives users a powerful tool called “Lists” that don’t get much attention. You can make a private or public list of people you follow as a way of grouping or sorting accounts. The difference is that a public list allows other Twitter users to follow the members of a list, even without following those individual accounts. Private lists can only be seen by you.
I made two public lists, one for news and politics, and the other for local weather news. This allows me to filter down to only those topics for times when I’m most interested. Is there a storm coming? I’ll monitor the weather list. Presidential debate? Follow along on the politics feed. One reason I made them public was so my wife could subscribe to them. She can dip into them for information as she may like, without having to seek out and following a bunch of individual accounts.
For me, the game changer is grouping the accounts that I most want to keep up with. Close friends and colleagues go into a core list of 80 people. A number of those accounts are rarely used, so it’s probably like 40 truly active people. That group never gets so busy that I cannot catch up in less than a few minutes of reading. This is the primary way I view twitter. 80% of my time on Twitter is spent in this list. For all intents… it is my timeline.
I have a secondary list with under 300 accounts that are just actual people twittering. No news, no organizations, no bots. That sounds like a lot of accounts, but by restricting out the organizational accounts, the post frequency goes down, making it a busy, but manageable source. It is certainly easier to digest than the 555 total accounts I follow. When I’m in a net surfing or time-killing mood, that’s when I hop out to my main timeline. It’s fun to pick through that firehose a few times a week.
If you’re considering shutting off social media altogether, first try a few simple filters. You can continue to benefit from all the reasons you joined in the first place. Remember, the Internet is just bits. It’s completely up to you how to use those bits, how many, and when.
4 weeks ago