Twitter Lists are very convenient to keep an overview. Especially when you are following a lot of tweeps and your timeline becomes massive, or when you are interested in several topics and want to focus on one topic at a time. I’m sure that there are a lot of people that don’t know about the existence of Twitter Lists. A reason for that is that you can only access Twitter lists on a computer, not via the (standard) mobile Twitter app (which I personally think is a pity).
Now what exactly is a Twitter List? Simply put: you create a list, and add tweeps to that list based on the subject they tweet about (e.g. social media, cooking, music, …), their profession (for example journalists), or their relationship to you (e.g. colleagues or friends). Lists don’t influence your timeline, meaning that when you don’t follow someone but add him to a list, you won’t see his tweets appear in your timeline. You will only see his tweets when you check that list. If you created a list containing comedians, and you check that list you will see a stream with tweets of all those comedians.
When you create a list you can decide to make it ‘public’ or ‘private’. If you make it public others can subscribe to the list (of course you can also subscribe to public lists of others). Next to that, when you add someone to a public list, they will be notified that you added them to a list…so it’s better not to make a ‘public’ list called “people I can’t stand” 😉
Adding people to a list can be done in different ways. When you check someones Twitter profile, you can click on the person icon to open a dropdown menu and select “Add or remove from lists…”.
If you didn’t create a list yet you’ll be able to create it from here as well. When you check someone’s profile like on the screenshot below you will also be able to see the lists of that person. When a person has lists you will see “Lists” mentioned in the top left navigation, and can click on it to see them.
Another way is to go to your ‘following” list, and follow the same procedure by clicking on the person icon to get the dropdown as mentioned above.
Now why am I so fond of Twitter Lists: it saves me time and effort, allows me to organize who I’m following, makes it easy to read tweets related to one topic or industry, and when I add someone to a list they will know that I value their tweets. I hope it will be useful to you too 😉