There’s a lot of great chats that come up on Monday (#usguyschat, #socialchat, #rbchat)… or any other day of the week for that matter. The chats are great for learning new tips, meeting new people and just having a good time.  But they also seriously crank up your frequency of tweets per an hour which not all your followers will appreciate.  Thankfully, there are some built in elements of Twitter that you can utilize to your advantage to help keep your followers happy.

Tip 1: Put @ replies directly at the start of tweets

One of the many handy tips you can learn from @tweetsmarter’s blog, is that when a tweet starts with an @ reply, only people that are following both you and the person being @ replied will actually see that tweet in their twitter feed. Thus by starting most of your tweets with @ replies while engaging in a chat, you can seriously cut down the perceived frequency of tweets per an hour and keep your followers a little bit happy. 

@Tweetsmarter has also conveniently created two different twitter accounts @hidechat and @hidetag you can @ reply and the beginning of chat tweets in order to hide them from your followers. 

Tip 2: Quote or paraphrase original tweets within comments

Chats go fast and there’s a real temptation to just hit the RT button when you see a tweet you like (which I find happens a lot!). Sometimes it makes sense to do so, but there can be a tendency to over-share/over-RT and when this is the case a helpful tip is to package the RT within a comment “quoting” or paraphrasing the original tweet within an @ replied comment:

3. Make tweets that go out to all followers look like original tweets

A good tweet is a good tweet is a good tweet. If  there is a super great idea in there you want to share, you should do it! But try to make it look a little prettier. If the tweet was an @ reply you can try rephrasing it as a quoted comment (making sure to give credit to the person being quoted!).  Or if there’s a trail of RTs at the start, maybe put them at the end of the tweet so the tweet looks a bit cleaner.

That’s what I’ve got for now. Do you have any other ideas of how to keep followers happy while engaging in chats?

At the request of a number of users, the Formulists team has added some additional ways to filter the people on your Formulists lists:

Now when you generate a Formulists list you can put the exact limits you want for the people that end up in it, in terms of minimum and maximum number of people they are following or being followed by as well as the maximum and minimum ratio for their followers to their following.

One possible application would be to adjust the maximum followers to following ratio of people on your “Does-Not-Follow-Me-Back” list to be 1 or 2.  This way you are more likely to find people that perhaps forget to follow you back, rather than celebrities and other accounts that just have a general policy of not following back everyone.