Unleash the power of Social Media

For the past few years I have been learning the use and analyzing social networks. I waste most of my time doing or finding nothing. So i believed “Social media is a time suck”. There are so many people and things to follow but there is so much less time.
It isn’t about following thousands and thousands of friends on twitter.  We don’t have the time or brain cells for that.    It’s about finding people who are connected to different social circles and following them.    Of course you have to be interested in what information or conversations they are sharing on Twitter.   Identifying these people or “nodes” is core of social network analysis or (SNA).
We need to build some redundancy in your network so you have a few multiple paths to people and ideas of interest to you.
Now this is efficient because.

“For the time invested, I want maximum return. I plan to use the redundancy of connections, between the many social circles I am interested in, to my advantage. I follow a select group of people that give me the same access as following someone in every group. Follow the few to reach the many!

So build a small yet efficient group that reaches out to the various information pools that you are interested in so think before you follow everyone. And use your time wisely   - Krebes.”

If you dint follow the rule above and want to put the tweets on a diet find some steps below.

Use tools to analyze your twitter network. There are many free tools available like follows:

Use Friend or Follow: to download a spreadsheet of followers. Sort the information to find  people to get to know.  This works best if you have small network.
Mr. Tweet: finds people in your network you should follow (use this after you have built up your following list).
Mailana: can help you identify people who have strong affinity. One problem is that it doesn’t analyze your network in real time. 
Twitalyzer: is a good analytics tool that gives you some good benchmarking metrics for Twitter. Run the impact report to help you identify influencers.
Twiangulate: lets you analyze cross over between your Twitter network and another Twitter user.  This can be useful to find potential collaborators and retweets.
Klout: lets you track the “influence” of specific Twitter users, including the growth of their network, who they influence, and who they are influenced by.
Mention Map: helps you visualize who is interacting with you around which hashtags.  It shows nodes on your network.  
Once you’ve started to identify connectors and people to follow, you’ll need to manage it.  Twitter lists can help you create sub-groups of all your followers.

Twitterfall: to analyze tweets all over the globe on a particular topic or keyword and reply, comment, or retweet.

Use your time and resources wisely!