Filter the Noise on Twitter

Twitter is an excellent marketing and communications tool, yet it can quickly reach a point where it may feel like there is far more noise than value.  Instead of giving up or starting over, try out some of the following tools to help keep yourself and your followers organized on Twitter.

TweetGrid
Setup a grid of automatically updated Twitter keyword search results. This isn’t used as a current contact management tool, but more for monitoring specific keywords or hashtags. I personally use this frequently when attending conferences.

TwitterSnooze
TwitterSnooze allows you to push the snooze button on specific people for a preset period of time. Know someone who will be live-tweeting a conference and you really don’t care? Snooze them and you won’t see their updates. A great tool for filtering out the incredible amounts of Twitter noise.

Friend or Follow
Check to see if people you are following are following you in return. Also use this tool to check to see which people are following you that you aren’t following. Included are a variety of sorting tools to better narrow down your lists to ensure you are following the people you want to be and aren’t suffering from any type of auto-follow mistake you may have made.

Mr. Tweet
Find new and interesting people to follow using Mr. Tweet. Recommend people you follow and receive automatic matches based on a variety of factors.

TweetDeck
The current leader for desktop applications to integrate with Twitter and Facebook. Upload images, shorten URL’s and conducting searches are some of the basic functions. Create groups so you can categorize the people you follow as well as using the additional filtering tools to find when those people talked about certain topics.

Seesmic Desktop
Seesmic Desktop is the upgrade to Twhirl. It is still in a beta (just subscribe to the email list to get the download info) and has many of the functions of TweetDeck including groups and searching to filter the noise. The only advantage I have found of Seesmic Desktop is the ability to manage multiple Twitter accounts from within the one application.

Tweepler
Similar to FriendorFollow, but with the ability to make batch edits of your follower/following lists. Greater ability to search and sort as well to determine who should stay on your list.

MyCleenr
Find out who you are following and sort them based on the last time they updated. This is definitely more of a simple clean up tool than something that will dramatically help you filter the noise. I typically take a moment to see if something catastrophic happened in the persons life before unfollowing just because they haven’t updated in a while.

Tweepular
This is easily the “prettiest” of all of the contact management tools for Twitter. Sort by mutual following, followers only, following only and soon recent unfollowers. Batch follow/unfollow people, search by keywords and sort the individual categories by several different criteria.

If I were to narrow it down, I would strongly suggest Tweepular for fast and easy list management, TweetDeck for desktop interaction and sorting/filtering and TweetGrid for monitoring specific keywords quickly and easily.

As always, exercise extreme prejudice when sharing your username/password with these sites/services and if you feel you may have a security breach, change your password directly at Twitter.com.