Today I decided to begin the process of clearing the signal I receive across the social networks I belong to. Essentially this involves un-friending, un-following, and deleting of some people in my ‘friend’ lists across Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, FriendFeed, Last.fm, etc. to try and limit the amount of noise in my conversation stream.
I know a lot of people subscribe to the theory that you can never have too many friends on these social networks, and for a long while I was of the same opinion, however lately I’ve come to realise that there is a tipping point where the amount of noise becomes overwhelming and the actual quality conversation gets lost, or at least too hard to manage.
I’m sure there are some naysayers out there who think this is a stupid thing to do. They would probably suggest I use an app like TweetDeck to group the different types of people I follow to make it easy to keep that noise out of the actual conversation stream I want to follow, however to me that is completely pointless and is actually doing them a favour keeping their follower / friend numbers up high, supposedly maintaing their ‘influence’. Typically these people are ‘social media experts’, or ‘social marketing experts’, or possibly just your run of the mill ‘internet marketer’ or ‘SEO expert’. *yawn*
If you’re still on one of my friend lists, congratulations…you actually post things I want to read.
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Mat, I think you're right. The tipping point has to be when you can no longer give/get value out of “networking”. The adage that quality over quantity surely remains.
Couldn't agree with you more Simon.
Recently I've been finding Twitter to be less valuable to me, I was following way too many people and there was just a constant non-stop stream that was next to impossible to follow in any meaningful way.
Since I culled the list this afternoon there's been a whole lot more meaningful conversation going on. Same goes for Flickr as well, I'm finding some great photos and web design inspiration….so much more valuable now!
Oh and in other news I'm working on your blog tonight. I need a break from the other bits and pieces.4
Mat, I think you're right. The tipping point has to be when you can no longer give/get value out of “networking”. The adage that quality over quantity surely remains.
Couldn't agree with you more Simon.
Recently I've been finding Twitter to be less valuable to me, I was following way too many people and there was just a constant non-stop stream that was next to impossible to follow in any meaningful way.
Since I culled the list this afternoon there's been a whole lot more meaningful conversation going on. Same goes for Flickr as well, I'm finding some great photos and web design inspiration….so much more valuable now!
Oh and in other news I'm working on your blog tonight. I need a break from the other bits and pieces.4
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