Mandy Kilinskis is a copywriter by day and fiction writer by night. She’s a huge social media enthusiast who loves traveling and everything geek. You can find her on Twitter.
It’s 2013.
Are you and your social media accounts buzzing along this new year with rapid success?
Why don’t you take a couple of hours to make sure that your Twitter profile is lean, mean, pretty, and ready to go for the rest of this year.
Here are a few steps for you to get your profile into tip-top shape.
Get Rid of the Excess
Has your Twitter stream become bloated with blogs, news outlets, and statues that you just don’t care about? Then it’s time to start unfollowing people and brands.
It can feel weird or impolite to unfollow someone, but if you’re not interested in what they have to say anymore, why bother having it pop up on your stream?
If you have a fairly manageable number of people you’re following (1,000 or less), you may want to just scan through your followers manually and make your decision on a profile by profile basis.
But if you’re following more than a 1,000 people, you’re going to need a little help. Consider signing up with Commun.it or Followerwonk. Both of these tools help you analyze people that follow your account (and if they follow you, there’s a good chance that you follow them, too) and give you insights into their influence.
Using these tools won’t just help you cut down on your own following counts, but they’ll let you know who to create stronger relationships with in the year.
Organize with Some Lists
Another way to take control of your feed is to create some Twitter lists.
Lists help you group relevant people together so that you can find information that you need or want quickly.
On Twitter, from the “Me” tab, click on “lists.” There you can create lists of topics or groups you want to follow. Whether this is “Cool Brands,” “Great Bloggers,” or “Friends” is up to you. Then go through the people you are following. In the options drop down menu, choose “Add or remove from lists.” Then you can assign these people to as many lists as you want.
A great service for creating lists is TweetDeck. TweetDeck makes it easy for you to create lists, monitor mentions, and even create a feed based on a specific hashtag.
Give Scheduling a Try
If you have yet to try scheduling your tweets, this year is the year to start trying.
Some people say that scheduling tweets takes the social out of social media, but I disagree. If anything, it’s a more considerate way to share information with your followers.
When you sign up for scheduling services like Buffer or Hootsuite, you can schedule tweets to spread themselves out over the course of the day. So instead of overwhelming your followers with five tweets in three minutes, you can spread them out and deliver relevant links throughout the day.
As long as you remember to check your mentions, you can still keep the social in social media.
Embrace the New Twitter Profile
Twitter has upgraded user profiles to feature a large background picture in addition to their avatar. This gives you a chance to show your followers and potential customers a little more about your personality and business.
Just be careful to not have important information on the bottom half of the picture. Your Twitter bio and website link will be under the picture.
Doing just these four things will put you on the right path to an easier year on Twitter.
Thinking about cleaning up your Twitter profile? What have you already done? Anything else to suggest?
"You’re such a smart boy!" were his first accolades heard. So, it’s no wonder that this phrase became the title of his business, Smart Boy Designs.