Some folks try to keep their online life meaningful and manageable by only following people they know personally. Others decide to “go big” and follow thousands of people from all over the world. By casting their net wider, they discover an abundance of new information, connections and opportunities beyond what their “real life” network could afford them.

Thanks to some new social media filtering tools, you can now have the advantages of following a large network — without losing track of the people who are dearest and most important to you. Here’s how:

Twitter: How to Make Groups in Tweetdeck

If you’re using the web version of Twitter, stop. The rudimentary interface makes it difficult to communicate with more than a handful of people, and it’s easy to miss people’s messages. Tweetdeck is a free client, or desktop software application, designed to make Twitter more usable. So download Tweetdeck. Install it. Fire it up. And get ready to expand your social possibilities:

1.) Click on the “Groups” icon in the top, upper left toolbar:

2.) Give your group a name, check all the members, and click “Save Group” at the bottom:

3.) Click the “Move Column” Icon at the bottom, scooting it over to where you want it:

3.) Voilà! You now have a list of your local friends’ updates, right next to the ‘raw flow’ of all friends:

Update: @ApothecaryJeri left a great tip about how to manage your groups once they are already set up in the comments below.

Facebook: How to Use Friend Lists to Filter Updates

Facebook now lets you create friend filters / groups so you can follow important groups of people without getting lost in an avalanche of random noise. To get started, go to your Friends page. Then:

1.) Click “Make a New List” in the left toolbar:

2.) Enter a name for this friend group:

3.) Click the “Select Multiple Friends” text link

4.) Click the icon of each friend you want to add, then click “Save List“:

5.) Return to your Home Page. Select the filtered friends list in the left sidebar, and… voilà! Good, clean, filtered updates that are easy to digest

Now you’re free to follow a large network people and have the ability to send them messages and invitations, without getting smothered in the minute details, quizzes and emotions of every single person’s online life. I personally made a list for local Colorado friends, a list for social media & business people, one for family, and one for childhood friends.

Digg: How to Follow A Few Friends’ Submissions Closely

In an effort to crack down on blind reciprocal voting, Digg has continually tweaked their user interface to make it more difficult and time consuming to Digg your friends’ stories. Fortunately, they still give you RSS feeds for each of your friends’ stories… allowing you keeping close tabs on your best friends’ stories while maintaining a much larger network of mutual friends (i.e. for networking & shouts).

I personally like the Whizz RSS extension for Firefox. It’s quick and it’s integrated directly into your browser screen, so you don’t have to launch another tab or application. First, install Whizz RSS and then go to the profile page of the friend you want to follow closely:

1.) Click on “Submitted” in the “Stats” section of the lower right sidebar:

2.) Click the yellow sidebar icon in the horizontal Whizz RSS Firefox toolbar :

3.) Right-click (or control-click) on the top category and “Add Category” for this group. Call it ‘Digg Friends’:

4.) Drag and drop the RSS icon from your friend’s profile page into your new ‘Digg Friends’ folder:

Now you can click the yellow sidebar icon in the Whizz RSS toolbar any time, and go through your closest friends stories. If you right click, you can “Open All Unread Stories” in tabs and Digg away – giving you much better speed and control than Digg’s native system allows.

Do you have any tips on how to follow more people without getting buried in noise? Please share them below!

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