How to Cut out the Fluff from Your Twitter Stream

I got inspired to write this when I read Parajunkee’s post a few days ago. One of the points I made in my comment to her post was that better organization and filtering could help a lot when dealing with the fluff (promotional pieces) that overpowers the really interesting content in our social feeds.

In my mind, easier discovery of content we like could lead to more engagement and more fun discussions which is stimulating for the bloggers to keep doing what they’re doing.

So basically the intention of this post is to teach you how to filter out the noise. 

I’m going to focus on how I do that with Twitter which is the place where I mainly get my bookish fix every day. Most people just go to twitter.com and log into their profile. That’s OK if you don’t follow a lot of people or if you don’t need many features.

What I’m using is an app called TweetDeck (made by the folks from Twitter by the way) which you can get from here. You can either run it in your web browser or download the desktop app. You need to create a TweetDeck account in order to use it.

Once you’re done with that and assuming you chose to run the app in your browser go to tweetdeck.twitter.com (tip: bookmark this so you don’t have to remember and type it again) and log in. What makes TweetDeck useful is that you can manage multiple Twitter accounts from one place, e.g. your personal and your blogging account, etc.

Now, for every account you have you’re going to see a Home column like in the picture bellow. Click on the slider icon I’ve pointed out in red.

 What you’re going to see are few options for this column. We’re interested in the Content row – click the arrow:

 Some more options pop up. Look at the ‘excluding’ field. That’s where we type in all the keywords we’re not interested in. If they appear in tweets from people we follow we’re just not going to see them.

I’ve compiled a short list of keywords already but of course you can add more or remove them at will. The keywords I’ve put in are: Hop, Giveaway, cover, reveal, promo, hop, via, blast, spotlight, Spotlight, tour, promotional, giveaway, release, gift card, GIVEAWAY, Blog Tour, Cover Reveal. Just copy&paste them like so:

 Hit the Enter key and click the slider icon to collapse the menu. That’s it! Your Twitter feed is fluff-free now. 🙂

Of course, if you manage more than one account you’ll have to do this separately for each one.

Note: I don’t know if it’s a bug in TweetDeck but it seems for each excluded keyword you have to type it in all possible ways to make sure you don’t see tweets that contain it.

For example if you don’t want to see cover reveal posts you’ll have to put in: cover, reveal, cover reveal, Cover Reveal and so on. Still, for some reason a few posts manage to sneak in but it will probably be ironed out with the next version of the app.

If you follow hundreds of people like I do, you’ll immediately notice how much quieter your feed got. 😀

There are other advantages in using TweeDeck over just going to the website but I think this one is pretty useful.

If you liked this little tutorial or you want me to make one for other social media websites, leave a comment bellow.