I can now breathe in my Twitter environment. Wow this feels so very refreshing indeed. Let me tell you how it was in the beginning.

I was following about 1000 people. And you know what? I have not clicked the “Follow” button by reading their profile for all those 1000 people I was following. Yet for more than a year I have been following 1000 people. It is not surprising that I used to HATE Twitter in the past.

So last week I took a massive action and just unfollowed the mass. While I was unfollowing them I read everyone’s profile carefully so that I don’t unfollow any person who I might be interested in. Ironical isn’t? I didn’t read their profile while I decided to follow them!

Let me tell you the truth. To be honest, I never knew how I ended up following such a big number. You may be surprised. So as I do. I still can’t dig out the secret to this question. But I *may* be using some sort of mass follow program or something which automatically followed people.

This is my guess. Because how could I possibly follow people who tweet about poker, hiking, asking me for a date, photography etc. while my interests are solely on blogging, seo, relationships, time management, goal setting, etc. (well I have to use all of my blog’s meta keywords here ;)).

So that is not the end of the story. I told you that I used to HATE Twitter. Yes, because of the number of tweets that arrive at my dashboard within a second. If I leave my Twitter tab open for about a minute and leave the tab and come back, I can see the message “152 new Tweets”. You see, how annoying it is?

Due to this, I wasn’t using Twitter at all to promote my blog. And I wasn’t using it to benefit from other’s tweets as well. And I couldn’t. How could I look into those very few tweets that interest me among the sea of hundreds of spammy/uninteresting tweets?

But now I must say that I regret. Yes, because I have wasted these months in not knowing how to USE Twitter. And many times I have commented at Ana’s blog posts that I have not been able to get the most out of my Twitter. But now I know why.

Anyways that’s for good that I have unfollowed people who fell into any of the following categories mentioned by Lisa.

#1 I follow and receive an automated DM - Ya I had about 200 of them. Those DMs were not welcoming messages or warm ones; but just sales pitched messages.

#2F4F Nut - These people say it explicitly in their profile message; quite easy for me to unfollow without having to check out their full profile and tweets :).

#3 Tweet Whore - 80% of them were in this category.

#4 Never acknowledge me - No I didn’t check this and this wasn’t the reason I unfollowed people. Why because I was not watching if anyone is responding or acknowledging me. You know my ship was over full and I just couldn’t manage all those passengers.

#5 The Eggs - Similar to #2; it was so easy for me to click the unfollow button as soon as I saw the egg!

Past is past. So hereafter this is my strategy of Twitter usage.

Following:

So as I said now, I have done a mass unfollow. I am still scrutinizing to see if I have unfollowed any genuine soul. I have decided to follow only those souls whose tweets are not spammy and interest me.

Interacting:

Yes, since I have a very clean inner circle, I am able to watch the tweets and retweets so closely. I can see who retweeted my stuff. I can watch the mentions on my name. I can look into DMs (but I am still not very comfortable with DMs; more convenient ones are the @janesheeba mentions).

I will respond as much as possible to the tweets, retweets and mentions on my name. I will be able to click on the links on the interesting tweets. All these things, sound like a great adventure to me. But I just now know that these are the components of the right strategy in using Twitter.

I will carefully stay away from the incredibly popular trend among tweeters as mentioned by Nick @ Traffic Generation Cafe. Here is an excerpt of the trend he pointed out

Here’s a few characteristics that you’ll notice of these:

• They have different accounts for each site or project.
• They automate the publishing of their links.
• They seldom respond to those who retweet or mention them.
• They often follow/unfollow using automated software to build as many followers as possible.

Promotion:

Of course I will now be able to promote my blog posts in a very good and improved manner. And I am concentrating much on meaningful manual tweets, although I have set up one automated tweet application that will tweet my blog post once as soon as it goes live.

Followers:

I am really not going to control the number of people who choose to follow me. I indeed use True Twit to validate my followers just to avoid any automated process in that regard. Otherwise I am fine with the number. However I’d be happy with a handful of serious and interested followers rather than thousands and thousands of “mere” followers who do nothing.

There has been a face off or in girly terms a cat fight between Nick Cardott and Ana Hoffman about the numbers: Ana says “Quantity trumps quality” and Nick seems to be prefer quality over quantity. I am with Nick, by the way.

So on to you guys. How’s my Twitter strategy? I hope all goes well, and I strongly think it will. Let me know what you think.