How can you follow thousands on twitter?

Twitter icon for a fluid app
Originally uploaded by mfilej

When I did the Intro to Social Media I was asked how many people I follow on twitter. I said over 1500 but the accurate count (today at least) is 1901.

“Impossible”, the man said, “how can you monitor over 1500 people?”

The simple answer. I don’t.

I know there are a lot of tools out there for getting organised better with twitter. I also know that there are a lot of advice articles on how to use twitter.

But for me – and I think it’s a good approach there is only one way to do it.

Use a twitter client, relax and trust your network.

Here’s how this goes.

Step 1: I use a client

I use twhirl but I know there are a lot of clients out there (see for example The Top 21 Twitter Clients (According To TwitStat) on TechCrunch). It helps me to not miss any replies or direct messages – they are aggregated and it also helps me search.

Step 2: I (try to) relax

I stopped worrying about missing out on things ages ago. I can’t be online 24/7 nor do I want to. If I miss something oh, well it happens. OK, fine sometimes I go haywire and I really want to know NOW but generally I try to keep a healthy distance. The fact that I don’t blog about news & tech helps obviously as I never feel that I have to be the first to know most things.

Step 3: I trust my network

This is what most people not exposed to digital don’t get about social media. I don’t have to be there all the time. My network is. The good stories, the interesting stuff will come up on the surface. People with re-tweet, friends will send me a direct message. The genius of this system is that I don’t have to worry if everyone is online. The network will take care of it.

Having said that, notoriety is not a guarantee of quality and re-tweets are a case in point. Good stories frequently get buried. That’s where all the tools I use come into play. Even if I miss it on twitter I will see a blog post or a friendfeed discussion (which is where the friendfeed aggregation comes in handy) or something.

How about you? How do you navigate the noise? How do you make sure you find out what you want to know?