As my network on Twitter has grown the question of quality has come more to light. I’m good at skimming TweetDeck for a couple of minutes and getting the gist of today’s trends among my friends and the twitterverse but the staggering growth of random comments and twitter spam (twam? Spitter… yeah, let’s go with Spitter) can be, at best a distraction and at worst, a good way to waste an afternoon trying not to miss your real friends’ tweets.

So now the question arises of whom should you follow? Everyone is different and uses Twitter for unique reasons. I look at it as a way to connect with like-minded industry types and local social media and ad types, which means I’ve got some serious cleaning to do. Here is my cleansing strategy. It’s loose but effective.

The Sniper approach – This is where most of my casualties of followership have occurred. During the day I’ve typically got either TweetDeck or the TwitterGadget for iGoogle running. As those I follow break my cardinal rules (20 posts in a row, consistent “get 16k followers overnight” posts, etc.) I unfollow. It’s an active pursuit and you have to be monitoring but it’s better than going line-by-line on your following list.

The Time-to-Burn approach – As the title suggests, this is one of those rotting in front of the television on a rainy Sunday afternoon while the kids are napping activities. It’s also recommended that you have a movie you’ve seen a million times running in the background. All you do is open your following list and scan down the list, line-by-line, page-by-page, unfollowing any and all that appear to be spammers. They’re usually easy to find. Usernames like @12kfromtwitter or @asdfjhsaduew (names are made up, but you get the point) are a dead give away.

The Anti-Social Networking approach – are you the victim of your own early naivety? You’re following any and everyone from an early attempt to gain followers and now you miss the few and far between messages from the 6 people you actually want to hear from every day? Maybe you need a clean slate. While I don’t recommend it, there are tools out there that will let you unfollow everyone on your list. Take a look at the Mutuality tool from Huitter (http://www.huitter.com/mutuality/). This tool will allow you to unfollow everyone on your list, those who don’t follow you, and even make sure you’re following everyone who’s following you (not recommended). The trick here is to view the report upon completion and re-follow those you actually wanted to keep hearing from.

These are just a few ideas on maintaining a healthy network on Twitter. I find twitter infinitely more enjoyable with a well groomed following list. Remember, twitter is like proper diet, Garbage in = Garbage out. Get focused and you’ve got yourself a powerful tool.