My Favourite Twitter & Instagram Hacks

Social media can be incredibly overwhelming, especially in such uncertain times. Your feeds can get bogged down in retweets and reposts and ads and promotions and it gets hard to sort out the mess. That's why I'm going to share my two favourite hacks, one for Twitter and one for Instagram, so you can curate the feed you want.

On my social media, I care less for the number of followers I have and more for the content I'm seeing. I don't immediately follow back everyone who follows me - I spend time going through their account to see if I like the content. On Twitter, if I see too many retweets and not enough original posts, I won't follow that account.

BUT, if you like their content, and they still retweet too many times during the day, you can turn off retweets. This is my favourite Twitter hack, and it's so simple.

Every time I follow someone, I immediately click the drop-down menu beside the follow button and hit "turn off retweets." (I already have it off for VE Schwab, but I can easily turn it on again the same way.)

This way, any time they retweet something WITHOUT a comment, it won't show up in my feed. This doesn't apply to quote retweets, which is fine because they are still sharing their original content on top of the retweet. Now random people I'm not following aren't showing up in my feed. (An important point to note here is that I always have my feed on "latest tweets first." If I was back "home," I'd be seeing tweets other people have liked and retweets no matter what.)

I'm even more selective when it comes to who I'm following on Instagram. Both sites have a mute function, which allows you to continue following someone without seeing their content anymore, but my favourite Instagram hack is muting Stories.

I only learned about this one recently, when I got tired of seeing someone's promotional content all day, every day, in their Stories. Normally, this would be fine if it was promoting their book or author content, but this stuff wasn't related to writing at all, and I got so sick of seeing it. Without wanting to unfollow that person, I simply muted their Stories, and now they don't show up at all (I still see their posts in my feed, though).

To do that, go to someone's account (I'm not going to mute Jessi's Stories, this is just for demonstration):

Click the "following" drop-down menu, select mute, and then toggle Stories. That's it! There's even a little disclaimer telling you the person won't know you've muted them, so mute away!

So there you have it! My two favourite hacks for Twitter and Instagram that keep my feed tidy. Let me know down the comments if these tips helped and what other social media tips and tricks you'd like to see on my blog.

As always,