The Crowd For DMB 1

Over this past year I’ve leveraged lists in Twitter to filter down the thousands I follow to the people I want to follow closely and interact with regularly. One of the people who have made it to one of my top lists, People Who Say Things, Ken Gordon, posted this today:

.@joshmccormack @JohnWLewis @jgombita @Renee_Hopkins @martinlieberman @MattTGrant How are we going to make our Twitter exp. better in 2016?

— Ken Gordon (@quickmuse) December 31, 2015

It’s an important question. We’ve all seen and discussed how much of Twitter has become stuffed with quotes, self promotional links, “content curation” and even less desirable content. Finding the social in social media is increasingly difficult. I hunt for good conversation. I learn from listening and replying. I make friends. And I build reputation. It’s not financially motivated, but I believe strongly that when you get to know people and they get to know you, when you have something to pitch people who know you and think well of you will not only listen, they’ll likely tell others.

I unfollow people who haven’t tweeted in the past 30 days. I block people selling connections, people posting porn and offensive content. And I’m always on the look out for people to add to my lists who I’ll keep trying to get into discussions with.

In 2016 I’m hoping to improve my skills at finding great people to interact with and continuing to make friends. I’ll seek out followers from chats, lists and friends connections. I’ll comb through them, unfriending, blocking, adding to lists. I’d love to find tools that could facilitate this and show me people who reply and have discussions, and who have real followers. I’ll keep you posted.