MANAGING TWITTER FOLLOWING FOR COMPETITIONS

As you all know I am an avid comper and try and enter as many as I can through social media such as Facebook and Twitter.

As you can only follow 2000 people at any one time, it can be easy to reach this limit on Twitter and unless you have some magical spreadsheet method for remembering which competitions end on certain dates, it can be a bit of a nightmare deciding who to "unfollow". 

Well, I have a solution that may take a little bit of time at the beginning of each month, but I promise no more than 10 minutes.

OK. The first step is to be brave and go through all the people you are following and unfollow those who you are pretty sure you haven't seen listing competitions recently.

Then you need to go into your profile and set up three lists - labelled Competitions April, Competitions May and Competitions June (clearly it needs to be the current month and the next two months, so depending on when you read this post, make sure you use the correct ones). I always have them as private lists as they are purely for your own competition tracking purposes.

Then it becomes very simple...when you follow a company to enter a competition, click on the icon next to the FOLLOW button and then ADD OR REMOVE FROM LISTS. Simply check the box next to the month that the competition ends in. If the competition depends on a number of followers being reached, then you have to take a view as to whether you place the company in one, two or even three lists.

Note that you can only have 500 people in any one list so some months you may need to set up another list called (for example) Competitions April 2.

At the beginning of the second month (May in my example) - I usually wait until around the 5th or 6th of the month - go into the list for the first month (April in my example) and unfollow everybody!! I know this sounds drastic, but trust me!! Once everyone has been unfollowed, delete the list. YES DELETE THE LIST. You won't need it for another year and too many lists becomes unmanageable. Even if you were following 500 people, this means 500 clicks and at one click a second, this takes less than 10 minutes.

Then, go into the lists for months 2 and 3 and follow anyone who is now showing as not followed. There are always going to be some. This means that your competition entry that depends on a retweet and follow remains valid.

Finally, set up another list for the new month 3 (in my example Competitions July) and start the process all over again.

If you do this on a regular basis you will find that you may get close to the 2000 limit at the end of a month, but you will rarely exceed it.

Happy comping everyone!!