Twitter is a wonderful tool for both individuals and companies to use to grow their web presence and monitor their brand. It allows businesses to target keywords, locations and people to send their message. They can also connect on a deeper level by opening the communication channels without a huge overhead or the need for focus groups.

Unfortunately, it has also turned into a bit of a popularity contest, where companies want to collect as many followers and possible. The problem with this strategy is that many of those followers have zero benefit other than a number. If I asked you if you’d rather have 3 customers or 10 people who mayor may not  buy your product, which would you choose? Smart choice would be the 3 customers, right? With twitter, it seems that many businesses overlook this simple central ideal when working on their follower strategy.

So what can you do?You can clean up both your twitter account and your twitter strategy. To get started, focus on what you have already. Take a couple hours to look at your follower list, and unfollow anyone who is not beneficial to you. You can continue to follow some “fun” people, but remove any celebrities (unless they are your clients?) or people who you don’t ever read their tweets. Then, once your list is clean, focus on keeping it strong. Search for people that are within your niche or client base to follow instead of just following anyone and everyone. This will make the conversations more focused.

Once you have cleaned out and focused your list, you will be able to have a better response with less clutter.

Have you cleaned your twitter account?