I get asked this all the time, I’ll try to explain what tools I use and how I can possible listen to thousands of followers at once.

Here is a quote I overheard on the net; which is better, someone following 10 people with 10,000 followers or someone following 10,000 people with 10,000 followers. I say the second one and here is why. I learn so much from the users I’m following and I chat with many of them every single day. I’ve been able to get several great job leads and have also been able to help out many users with the information that I know such as vBulletin, SEO or Managing an Online Community.

Twitter has turned into the new google search for me, if I don’t know something I’ll ask on twitter before searching for the answer on google. The reason why I like searching twitter is because than you can talk to people who are actually using the products or scripts that I’m usually asking about. This may not work for everyone but it’s been very helpful for me.

Twitter is a great way to see breaking news as well like the plane that went down in the Hudson; there were pics on twitter before any news station was even on the water. How could this of happen if it hadn’t been for the power of Twitter?

Okay, so I said I would explain how I manage all the people I follow, so I might as well get started on that. I already posted a video in my last update “The Twitter Addiction” on how you can use Tweetdeck to follow 15,000+ people; I’ll go into a little more detail on how I use Tweetdeck and other Twitter applications.

When I’m on the phone I use an app called Tweetie, it was 3$ and worth every penny. There are other free ones but I felt this was the fastest with a large following group. It does pretty much everything other app will do but just quicker. I’m able to make search terms so I can filter out different groups that I want to read up on. I can also see what Tweeple are talking about around me within X miles, which is all adjustable and configurable from whatever area I’m in. Tweetie is great but I often max out the API which is set at 100 request an hour. That isn’t hard to do with a few searches and a few RT’s and you’ve already used 20 or 30 request, so use it sparely. If I max out my API and I’m on the phone and want to get a message out, I’ll use my AIM account and ping.fm to send it out. If you don’t know what ping.fm is, I strongly suggest checking it out. I signed up for it almost a year ago and added all my social networking sites (20 options at the time). They’ve since added more services, it’s a great program and well worth the time to connect all your social networking sites.

I run Tweetdeck along the same lines as I mentioned with Tweetie. Make groups and searches to manage the nonstop flow of information from the Tweeple you follow on Twitter. I run into the same problem with Tweetdeck as I do with Tweetie and the API maxing out. When that happens I use another desktop application called Seesmic. I think it’s pretty new, at least I hadn’t heard of it until a week ago. It does the same thing as all the others, unfortunately I haven’t found out how to export my groups from Tweetdeck to Seemic, so I have to start all over building and filtering out the groups on it.

I also use a small application called TwitterLocal, it allows me to see what people are talking about X miles away from my zip code. This doesn’t have an API request, so it’ll never max out, but if you block someone from Twitter, it will still show their updates in TwitterLocal. Other than that small annoyance, it’s a great window to have up.

Twitter is a fun tool for me, I hope it’s fun for you as well.

-Brandon Sheley

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