Twitter is both a great information gathering resource and effective communication tool, but it is easy to become overwhelmed with what the service puts in front of you. Many Twitter users enthusiastically follow other users early on, only to find that their timeline is now moving too fast and they can’t find the tweets and users that are really important to them. The solution for many is to unfollow Twitter users, and many go one step further and give up on the medium altogether. Twitter lists to the rescue, in October 2009 Twitter introduced the lists feature.
A Twitter list allows you to create a custom list or group of Twitter accounts around any theme or topic you choose. The ability to create lists allows you to create custom and well organized timelines focused on topics, locations and people of your choice. But how can this help you? The primary purpose of Twitter lists is to allow you to organize the people you follow to make it easier to find them and track their tweets. In effect Twitter lists allow you to create filtered timelines.
Creating Your First Twitter List
Every Twitter account has the ability to create 20 named lists and each of those lists can follow 500 Twitter accounts. The basic process for creating a Twitter list depends on the tool you are using to access Twitter, but at its core the process consists of:
Naming Your List:
Give your list a short descriptive name indicating the nature of the accounts it follows. The list name can be up to a maximum of 80 characters long, but practically speaking, that is more than you should ever use. It is also worth noting that you cannot start a list name with a number. As you can only create 20 lists in total, if you plan on using lists a lot, then you should spend a little time figuring out the most effective way of categorizing and naming your lists.
Entering a Description:
This is optional but is a nice feature to tell others a little more about what your list is about and why they might like to follow it. Your list description must be less than 100 characters long.
Public or Private:
If you have a list that you don’t want others to see just click private and your done. Some applications that create lists for you will make lists private by default. Most lists are best kept public so others can benefit from them.
Lists in Twitter Aggregators
The power of your new filtered timelines can be realised by either viewing you Twitter lists through Twitter.com or even more conveniently as columns or streams in 3rd party Twitter tools such as Hootsuite or Tweetdeck. Imagine now having many timelines where you can view messages that come only from a specific list of users, users who generally talk about a specific topic, or users from a specific geographical location. Imagine no more! This is what Twitter lists were made for.
Not sure what a column or stream is or how to set one up in your favourite Twitter tool? Here is a quick list of handy tutorials to guide you along the path to Twitter List Nirvana:
Creating a list in New Twitter
Creating a Twitter list in Tweetdeck
Create new Twitter list within Hootsuite
Creating a Twitter list in Seesmic Desktop
Twitter List Management Tools
The fun doesn’t end here though. Can’t be bothered to make your own lists? Don’t worry! You can follow lists other people have made, and you don’t even have to follow the people in the list On the other hand Twitter lists can be a great place to find interesting people to follow, especially if you know or share the same interests as the person who created the list. Check out Listorious.com for a huge directory of lists by topic. What if you find a great list and want to easily follow all or some of the individuals on that list? TweepML (currently undergoing an overhaul) allows you to do this and much more.
Maybe you like the idea of lists and would like to have your own lists, but just don’t have the time to do it. Fear not! There are plenty of great free 3rd party solutions to your problem. My favourite so far is Formulists.com. Formulists allows you to automatically create Twitter lists based on a number of predefined lists such as “People-Like-Me”, “Who-My-Friends-Talk-To” and “People-Who-Retweeted-Me”.You are not only restricted to Formulists predefined options, there are many ways to further filter your lists.
Did you know that you can find out if other people have put you in a Twitter list? Doesn’t it just give you a warm and fuzzy feeling to know you are list worthy? Remember other people feel the same way when you add them to a list. Especially if that list contains other great Twitter users and has a great name like “Masters of the Twitterverse” or “Would trust with my life”! Follow @Listwatcher through Twitter to receive Direct Message alerts when you are added to or removed from a Twitter list.
Advanced Twitter Lists
Did you know that you can add Twitter accounts to more than one list? If you feel that a Twitter account belongs in more than one of your list categories then by all means add them to several. Be aware that this may mean you will see some tweets many times as you browse through your lists, but if you set this up correctly those tweets should be adding value to those list timelines. Adding Twitter accounts to several Twitter lists opens up further possibilities for advanced list management. For example, if you create a list called ‘Winnipeg’ and another list called ‘Web Designers’ you can now cross reference those lists to see which of the web designers on your list hail from Winnipeg. Tweepdiff is a really useful tool that will allow you to perform this kind of Twitter list cross referencing.
Glossary
Not quite sure what a timeline or list is? Here’s a little further explanation.
Lists Glossary: http://support.twitter.com/entries/166337-the-twitter-glossary#l
Timeline Glossary: http://support.twitter.com/entries/166337-the-twitter-glossary#t
Twitter List Widget: http://twitter.com/goodies/widget_list
The End?
There’s so much more we could cover here about the advanced use of Twitter lists, but perhaps that is a post for another day. If you have any questions or anything you would like me to cover in a future blog post just let me know in the comments section below.
Tags: social, social media, Twitter, twitter lists
