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I am pretty happy with the process I’ve worked out to review and retweet items at Twitter, so I thought I’d write a blog post about it.  I’ll warn you that it may not be very useful if you follow more than a few hundred people (I follow ~180 folks at this point) or if you’re not interested in retweeting items.  Otherwise, read on to learn one way to manage your Twitter information overload.

The two tools I rely upon for my Twitter process are the Favorites feature and scheduled posting.  I use HootSuite for scheduling, but it’s not the only option out there.  (Feel free to share tips about other scheduling tweet tools in the comments.)

First, I open up my Twitter page and load more tweets until I find the last one I read.  I prefer to do this from Twitter’s web interface because they load more tweets on the same page — I hate page reloads.  Once HootSuite implements this feature (they tweeted me to let me know it was in the works, after I tweeted about it), I will probably do all my Twitter processing from there.

After I’ve found where I left off, I start reading new tweets, marking every item that interests me as a favorite.  Sometimes they are things I want to retweet, sometimes they are things I want to reply to, sometimes they are just things I want to hang onto for a while.  Whatever the reason, they all get a star.  Because tweets are short, this goes pretty quickly, and it lets me briefly drop in on Twitter several times a day to mindcast, catch up, and collect new interesting tweets without it becoming a huge timesuck.  For those of you familiar with David Allen’s Getting Things Done, this is fairly analogous to the “Collect” step in the GTD workflow process.

After a day of collecting tweets, I review them.  I read all the links that interested me and decide which ones to keep starred for later retweeting.  I un-star the ones I decide I don’t want to retweet.  I handle @replies as I come to them, posting them in real-time rather than on a schedule, and un-star them as well.  I will note that sometimes Twitter doesn’t like a lot of starring and un-starring, and sometimes stuff doesn’t get un-starred when I want it to, but it’s more a nuisance than a big problem.  Because this step requires me to read external articles, it takes more time, sometimes a couple hours if I have a lot to read and have things distracting me.  There are some similarities here to the GTD “Process” workflow step.  @Replies are “do it” items, retweets are “defer it” items, other interesting tweets are either kept starred for reference or unstarred if I decide they’re not so compelling after all.

At this point, everything left in my favorites is either something I want to hang onto for a while or something I want to retweet.  Time to schedule!  I like to schedule my retweets to occur throughout the day between the hours of 6am and 8pm (Pacific Time).  Frequency of posts depends on how many items I want to retweet; if I have ten items I might schedule them an hour apart, if I have more than that, the frequency may be more like 30-45 minutes.  I try to keep my retweets to under 20 items a day.  I also like to stagger posting times so they’re a bit random.  I think if I scheduled all my retweets for a specific time, say, 15 minutes after the hour, it would seem a lot more robotic, and I want to avoid that.  I am a real person tweeting, after all!  I’m just doing it in a way that keeps Twitter from taking over my life. =)

If I only have a handful of collected tweets, I combine the review and retweet steps, scheduling posts as I come to them.  Otherwise, for larger quantities, keeping these steps separate is definitely more efficient — after reviewing all your collected tweets, scheduling the ones you want to retweet only takes a few minutes.

When I started using this process, I was processing my retweets in the morning, but I’ve found it actually works better for me in the evening, after a day of collecting tweets.  I can set aside an hour or two to read links, scheduling retweets to happen the next day.

What I like about my process:

• I can repeat the Collect step as many times as I want before I schedule retweets.
• Collecting tweets is not a huge demand on my time, so I can do it in short bursts throughout the day.
• I like the lag that is introduced by reviewing in the evening — tweets get to live another day by scheduling them to retweet the next.
• Intentionally introducing lag also means I can take a day off from scheduling retweets without feeling like a slacker.
• Interspersing mindcasts and @replies in real time keeps me from seeming like a robot.
• I love the fact that scheduling tweets for the following morning means I’m posting on Twitter before I even get out of bed!  =D

So, how do you Twitter?  I’m particularly interested in learning how all of you people following thousands of other people manage it. =)