It's impossible to keep an eye on all the tweets from all your followers - I started to realise this as the number of people I was following grew to over 500, and then over 1,000.
I've heard some people say that if your follower numbers get too big, you must be on an ego-trip. Or you've lost the whole point of social media and are only interested in broadcasting.
I really don't agree with that - there are plenty of people on Twitter whose follower numbers have grown organically. But it's true that you start to lose the human contact of the early days. I've found I tend to have exchanges with the same small circle of tweeps, perhaps only 1% of my total followers.
But ... I do check out everyone who follows me, and if they look interesting I tend to follow back. Hundreds of interesting people. I'd like to see what they have to tweet, but the problem is:
a) I don't see their tweets because they're in a different time zone
b) I don't see their tweets because I'm focusing on my small 'friends' group I've set up on Tweetdeck
c) with so many tweets scrolling by, they just haven't made my radar
... or even all of the above. It could also be that they rarely tweet, of course.
Then, the other day, I started re-jigging my Tweetdeck groups. I started very simply, by adding some new people to my 'top friends' group. Immediately, the Twitter landscape changed. I saw stuff from people I'd never seen before and discovered a whole new set of interesting posts.
Just when I was starting to think Twitter is too much to handle, I saw the possibilities.
I could keep tabs on several groups, themed by interest or by influence. (Before, I'd only really had a 'top friends' group.) I could plan to re-jig the membership of the groups on a regular basis, favouriting the Tweeters who had caught my eye, joining in some new conversations and developing some really useful mini-networks. In this way, I'd be able to put more followers onto the radar (a small number at a time) and I'd be less likely to miss the best tweets.
I think I was also fired up by re-reading parts of Clay Shirky's excellent 'Here comes everybody'. His explanation of community as a network of 'clusters', or sub-groups, really inspired me.
So if you're at the point when your Twitter landscape is getting a bit stale, or simply too big to handle, I'd recommend regular reviews of your groups.
Btw, here's a useful article about how to set up Tweetdeck groups.
