Twitter is beautifully simple: it's a stream of information and news from the people you want to hear from. However, in its simplicity is the potential for it to become very complicated.
With each new follow, your Twitter feed becomes slightly more populated, and it becomes increasingly difficult to manage and maintain relationships. And with every Twitter tool or app (each promising to solve your crowded Twitter feed problems) comes a barrage of emails, valuable app space eaten up on your phone, and plenty of headaches trying to keep everything straight. Suddenly, it's like you've arrived in social media hell. Don't fret; there is help.
Not Scalable: Relationships
It's an easy game to play at first: "Oh, @coolkid1 is following me? Great! Time to follow back." You might even direct message that person or at-mention him to thank him for the follow. It's all good for a while, but if you really start to gain traction on Twitter, you'll quickly lose track of who has followed you, who you're following, and where the two intersect.
If you use just one app to manage your Twitter account, it needs to be SocialBro. This is a simple way to manage your relationships with followers and those you follow, which solves the issue of scalable relationship management.
While you're at it, disable the "@coolkid1 is now following you on Twitter!" emails. You can do that in Twitter's settings under "email preferences." When you're gaining multiple followers each day, constant notifications will start to annoy you.
Not Scalable: Feed Content
Twitter is impractical because it carries the assumption that you'll be sitting at your desk all day, staring at your Twitter feed. Unless you're actually doing this, you will miss tweets from friends, enemies, neighbors, and possibly someone who is running an account for your pet without your knowledge. If you don't work, go to school, or have a life, you can robotically take in every single tweet all day, but this is impractical for most people.
That's what led us to create Brook, a simple solution for the fear of missing out. It's a daily email digest of the best tweets from each person you pick. That way, even if @coolkid1 only tweets once in a blue moon, you won't miss it because it won't be buried in other people's tweets. You get just one email each morning and a weekly recap at the end of each week. One more nifty trick? You can even follow people without them knowing.
Not Scalable: App Overload
Everywhere I look, there are new Twitter apps popping up, claiming to be the almighty salvation for your tweeting life. It's important to be discerning and maintain a healthy skepticism toward all these claims.
It's easy to sign up for a service, download an app, or sign in with your Twitter account without first thinking, "How will this make my life easier?" But soon, you're getting push notifications left and right, your inbox is overflowing, and you're getting tweeted at and bothered by random apps that add clutter, rather than eliminate it.
There are two ways to thin out this herd of services. First, visit Twitter's website and go to "settings." From there, under "apps," you can revoke access from services you no longer need, want, or use. Another solution is to only sign up for services that match your needs based on the way you use Twitter. If it doesn't look helpful to you now, it will probably just annoy you down the road.
Scalable: Your Twitter
Although the service itself presents more challenges and the potential for overload the more you use it, Twitter is a wealth of information if you can manage it efficiently using a few helpful tools. What's the moral of this story? You should perfect the art of taming your Twitter account so you'll have more time to have great experiences (that you can tweet about later).