4 ways to organize your Twitter stream

With 100 million active users and as many as 1 billion tweets posted every five days, Twitter can easily become a lot of meaningless noise. The amount of chatter is enough to drive someone away from the platform, if not insane.

What can you do? How can you make sense of your endless tweet stream? Here are some practical tips:

1. Follow only relevant users.

The simplest way to make your Twitter stream more useful is to be selective about the users you follow. What interests you or your company? What kind of updates do you want to see? Be strategic about which accounts enter your feed. Only pick those who post content you find useful and interesting.

Not only will this make it easier to stay up-to-date, but it will make you look more interesting to others. On Twitter there’s a common perception that the follower/following ratio shows how influential you are.

2. Use lists.

With Twitter’s built-in lists feature you can organize users into easily-accessible groups, whether you follow them individually or not. When you break down Twitter this way, it’s like you have multiple streams you can access from one location. To catch the chatter of one particular group, simply click on that stream.