It is easy to get overwhelmed by following a large number of people

Some of the questions that I am often asked by people who are new to Twitter are:

• How do I sort out my followers, there are so many Tweets in my stream?
• How do you listen to Tweets when there is so much noise?
• How did I get on a list when I didn’t do anything?
• One of my friends Tweets 60 Tweets an hour, she is filling up my Twitter Feed:  Is there a way to not see all her Tweets?
• How do I find people to follow?

All these questions can be answered with Twitter Lists. 

Are you using Lists yet?  I thought it would be useful to explain why you might want to start using them and show you five different ways you can use Twitter Lists.

1.  Sort out your followers in groups

There are all sorts of reasons you might choose to follow someone.  Why not put them into groups so that you can pay more attention to them at different times?

• people you know
• people in the same industry
• people in the same company
• people attending an event
• people local to you
• news
• thought leaders
• famous people
• inspirational people
• people you recommend

The choice of how you want to divide your Twitter World is completely up to you. 

• You can create up to 20 groups. 
• It helps you to organise your followers so that you can listen more to the groups that interest you the most. 
• You don’t have to put everyone you follow onto a list. 
• If you are using Hootsuite or Tweetdeck, you can use your lists as your columns feed. 
• You are allowed to have up to 500 accounts in each list, but I would recommend that you don’t add more than 200 accounts to each list.  The lists become too noisy, otherwise, which defeats the purpose of having lists in the first place.

2.  See which lists you are on

It is always interesting to see how other people define you, sometimes it might surprise you. 

• If someone puts you on a list of interesting peeps to talk to and you enjoy chatting to them, you know that there are probably people on that list that you will engage with too. 
• If you are put on a local twitters list, you know that the other people are probably going to be local to you.  Different people have different definitions of local, though!
• Hopefully this will never happen to you, but if you find yourself on a non flattering list e.g. People to avoid.  This what you do: You block the creator to remove yourself from the list.  What this means is that they can no longer follow you or see your tweets and you will no longer see theirs.

3.  Put people on lists rather than following them

If you are interested in certain people, but you want to keep your stream uncluttered, you can follow people on lists rather than following them.  This means you can find out what people are tweeting about by looking at the lists rather than you main feed. 

• The advantage of this is that you can minimise the noise in your stream. 
• The disadvantage is that they cannot send you a private message and won’t follow you back.

4.  Follow other people’s lists

You are limited to creating 20 lists, but you can also follow other people’s lists. 

• If people have curated a list of people attending a conference, you can simply follow the list rather than having to recreate you own. 
• You can follow anyone’s public lists by going to their profile, searching through their lists and clicking on the “Follow this list” button. 
• A great source for lists worth following is Listorious.  Listorious is a third-party site that maintains a categorised directory of Twitter lists.

5.  Search other people’s lists for interesting people to follow

If you are looking for interesting people to follow, it is worth looking at the lists of people who you are already following. 

• It is an easy way to find people. 
• If you know someone through a mutual networking group, their list of people they know may include people you know too. 
•  I have found some brilliant people this way.

There are many creative ways to use Twitter Lists.  Let me know how you use lists by leaving a comment below.  Has this been helpful to you?  If you need a step-by-step guide to How to Create a Twitter List, you will find it here.

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