I am now following over 6000 people and have over 6000 followers as well on Twitter and you may wonder how I follow all these people.  I ask Oprah and she helps me perhaps!! The short answer is I don’t know

Well not completely Twitter is not like e-mail where you have to at least process ever mail you receive and make a decision on whether you delete, forward, act or process.  Twitter is an information stream that you can jump on or off as it suits you.

This is where Tweetdeck helps me process the stream much more effectively.  Here is how I approach it

Groups

I have several groups to bucket the people on my Twitter stream.  Here are some of the groups that I have set up outside the standard Replies,Direct Message and Favorites groups that come with Tweetdeck.

• People I Interact With – If I have replied to you AND you have replied back it shows someone who is willing to interact and chat on Twitter.  I straight away add you to this group and see you in this group straight away. I call it Interact as it is a two way conversation.  I have gotten some great information from friends on twitter and hopefully it will grow as my follower choice grows.  I have a bout 30 people in this group and they are all really interesting people.
• Sports and News Feeds - I subscribe to a lot of these from CNN to baseball to Spanish news to local RTE.  They tend to dump news in multiple Tweets at once and I don’t always have the time to scan them.  So I have a group where I keep this information.
• Social Media Gurus - There are a few people who are either real or self proclaimed social media gurus.  I keep a group for them and find it useful to mine their pearls of wisdom.
• Famous People - I admit it I do follow a few famous people and I like to see what they are doing.  Doubt if they care what I am doing but maybe one day sigh

FILTER
I think the best Tweets can often (not always) be those that are RTed by others or have a link in them.  This is where I often use the filter tool with Tweetdeck and this allows me to filter by any Tweet that contains http or RT.

So with Groups and Filters on Tweetdedk using Twitter you can become can possibly keep your sanity with Twitter.  The important thing is to follow people that you think are giving you valuable, interesting and often for me funny information.

IGNORE

Yes I tend to ignore the rest of them but occasionally something does catch my eye and I remember why I followed this person in the first place.

Related posts:

1. Bye Bye Whatever Your Name Was
2. 10 Twitter Tips for Beginners
3. Cleaning Up My Twitter Following List
4. How to Create an RSS Feed Using Twitter
5. The Number of the Beast