Twitter tip: use lists for focused following
When you first start using Twitter, your feed of tweets is a pretty straightforward affair. You’ve got your friends in there, some clients and business contacts, an occasional favorite blogger or guru.
As your list of followees grows into the hundreds and even thousands, your nice, quiet feed evolves into a cacophony of updates, links, TwitPics, replies, TwitVids, and RTs. Try to give each one even a cursory glance and 200 more will pop up before you finish the first screen.
Enter Twitter lists.
Just like you organize the contacts in your address book into family, business contacts, friends, etc., you can also organize the people you follow on Twitter so that you have a separate feed for each category. To get started using lists:
- Go to your home page on twitter.com and click on the number of people you’re following:
- Find a contact you want to put on a list, click the gray “Add to list” button to the right, and click “Create a list” in the dropdown that appears.
- Give your list a name (with no spaces); the description field is optional. In the Privacy field, you can either make your list public and allow others to follow it or keep it private.
- Your list is now set up; access it under the Lists tab on your Following page.
- Add more contacts to your lists (as many as you want) and it’ll start to look something like this:
That’s it! Now it’s easy to keep up with friends, clients, networking contacts, celebrities (oh, come on, you know you do), and favorite gurus.
So, what’s your secret for managing your Twitter feed? Share your wisdom with us in the comments, sage one!