I have recently improved my Twitter experience. 

How? 

I unfollowed all of the people that were filling my timeline with what I consider to be inane, self obsessed, nonsensical and worthless tweets.  

Don’t get me wrong, my tweets are occasioanlly inane and pointless but some people seem to spend a large part of their day sharing the most intricate and mindless details of their lives.  

The example that sticks in my mind is: ‘I spilt a lot of water onto the floor during my bath’.   

For a while I thought I should follow these people – some of them supposedly serious people in my industry.  I didn’t want to miss out on anything but after 12 months or more of perseverence (and annoyance) I realised that I wasn’t going to miss anything and unfollowed. 

Twitter is, as a result, far less annoying and vastly more useful, more enjoyable.

It’s like the Shuffle function on the iPOD, a run of great random songs on Shuffle is a great thing.  But there’s always a chance that that run can be rudely interrupted by a random song or the artist that you’ve outgrown or overheard, or your simply bored of.  Or something that you downloaded for a ‘laugh’ once (example: Mel and Kim’s Respectable).   

The next step for me is to edit my iTune library by de-selecting the songs that could barge in and spoil a great sequence of songs on Shuffle.   

People can do what they want with Twitter and its not for me to judge what’s inane and what isn’t – its all relative.  But if you’re finding that you’re on the receiving end of an excessive amount of noise via your social media channels and not enough signal then maybe think about the steps you can take to improve your chances.

Tags: content, facebook, noise, sharing, signal, socialmedia, twitter