I use TweetDeck to organize the people that I follow on Twitter and Facebook, and I have the application divided up into many columns. Three of the columns are Do Not Miss, AM (for Affiliate Marketing) and Autos/Companies. I always pay close attention to the people that I’ve put into the Do Not Miss column. The AM column has the largest number of people in it, but I do my best to skim and pick up important tweets that I can interact with. The Autos/Companies column, unless I’m really bored, gets largely ignored.

Do Not Miss is full of people that tweet personally. They may promote their sites or products, but they always do it from a personal point of view. They never (or at least, very rarely) automatically pipe anything into Twitter (something that I am sometimes guilty of myself, I know). Many of them are also personal friends of mine, but not all. Being interesting and personable gets you on this list., and I keep it short.

AM is populated by anyone that’s part of the affiliate marketing industry. There are many people in it that I don’t know personally, but I’m interested in what they have to say. This is kind of an “everyone else” column. If you don’t fit into Do Not Miss, and you’re part of the industry, you’re probably in this column. Most of what shows up in this column is personally sent, not automated.

Autos/Companies is nothing more than people or companies that I don’t want to unfollow (because they occasionally post something noteworthy) but I don’t want to pay a lot of attention to. They automatically post nearly everything to the stream, there’s nothing personal about the tweets, and it’s often little more than a stream of links to offers or coupons. These are tweeters that use services like twitterfeed.com or RT everything under the sun without regard for the answer to the question: do my followers really care about this?

If I told you that I’m not the only person that uses a system like this, would it surprise you? If we told you that you were on the Autos/Companies (or whatever title other folks give it) list and that we rarely read your tweets, would you change your style?

Which list do you think you’re on?