We all know that social media is pretty full on all of the time. If you’re like us, you’ll be bombarded all day from every angle – Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, SnapChat, Instagram… and that’s not even the end of the list.
We’ve also talked a lot about the “social media bubble” or “echo chamber”. I’m guilty of this a lot, opening a sentence with – “everyone on my Twitter says…”. Of course it does, because I’ve actively chosen to follow those poeple on Twitter, and the liklihood is I’ve chosen people from the same field or some pool of thought. A great example of this would be politics – if you support a party, then you’ll probably find your social media “bubble” all echo your thoughts and feelings (and rightly so). But, it means you’re missing out on the other stuff, and potentially from the information or content being shared on a less frequent basis, it’s slipping through the net.
Another point to make here is from my own perspective running a range of business profiles for clients. It’s in the interest of the business not only to follow other local businesses and people they want to target as customers, but the local influencers and profiles as well. This can mean that sometimes your timelines/newsfeed can end up entirely not related to your business, or of interest to your business. Wading through this can be hard when trying to find content you actually want to interact with, or retweet.
So if we concentrate on Twitter, did you know that you can actually mute words and phrases? So, if you find your newsfeed full of the Great British Bake Off or Doctor Who, you can mute these prases and not see any tweets to do with them (particularly good if you actually just don’t want spoilers…).
You can mute words or phrases in Twitter by going to your Settings & Privacy, and then click on “Muted Words”. These words and phrases will then be muted from your timeline, but it won’t mute them if you do a direct search in Twitter for them.
A muting overview:
- If you want to mute a word from your notifications, timeline AND replies to you, then include the @ sign before the word. Otherwise, the world will only be muted from your timeline and not from any conversations you have on going or your notifications.
- Once you mute a word or phrase, it’s set to mute forever. So remember to remove it if you only want it during a certain time of year or campaign.
- If you have those (annoying) emails that send you recommendations on who to follow etc, Twitter will not suggest content that includes phrases or words you have muted.
- Muting a word or phrase (without the @ before it), means Twitter mutes both the world and the hashtag.