Keeping Up With Connections: Looking for Best Practices!

The Ultimate Challenge

It’s what I find most challenging to stay on top of on social media (especially on Twitter and Google+)…reviewing the profiles of people who have just followed me, to see if their content, industry, or affiliations make following them back the right thing to do. I know that there are probably a hundred or so people among my Twitter followers and Google+ circles who I should be following, but I can’t keep up! And so, I’m begging. I’m pleading for you to share your thoughts, ideas and best practices on efficiently and effectively checking out profiles/posts to decide who to follow back.

What I Don’t Want

I don’t want to follow everyone. And I don’t expect everyone who I follow to follow me. If you don’t enforce some level of selectivity, picking out relevant content in your news feeds becomes a nightmare. I forget where I read it, but someone, somewhere wrote something to the effect of “When I follow everyone; I follow no one.” Truth! If you have to ferret through too many posts/tweets that are completely unrelated to anything that’s within your frame of interest, you’re distracting yourself from the content that really matters. That means the folks who should be getting your attention won’t be getting nearly as much as they deserve, and you could be missing out on some really good stuff.

Help!

How do you manage it?

Do you set aside a certain time of day/week/month to review and organize connections?

Do you put new connections into lists/specific circles as soon as you add them, or do you go back later and classify/categorize?

Do any of you follow everyone back, and then go back later to remove them if their content isn’t relevant?

Please comment here, send me an email or share your suggestions on my Facebook page, via Twitter or on Google+. I’m looking forward to learning from you and sharing your ideas with others in a future post! Thanks in advance for your help!!