If you are growing your online presence, particularly on Twitter, then you are probably starting to feel a little overwhelmed by your default Twitter news feed. Once you reach the triple digit mark of people you follow on Twitter, it’s easy to lose sight of valuable information that’s being posted by people you really want to keep up with.
Twitter lists are the solution to keeping your Twitter feed manageable and the information usable. If you aren’t familiar with Twitter lists yet, this is some extremely valuable and actionable advice: start using them right now! The sooner you start segmenting the people you follow on Twitter the easier it will be to maintain. Imagine needing to go through a list of a thousand Tweeps and moving them all around to different lists? That’s is far too daunting a task to be tackled by any sane human.
How To Create Twitter Lists And Add People To Twitter Your List
You can actually create a Twitter list when you go to add the first person, so you can kill two birds (get it?) with one stone here. If you want to know what kind of categories you should create as lists, check out my article on Business2Community on the 6 Twitter Lists Every Business Should Have.
To get started with adding people to your Twitter lists:
- Go to the profile of someone that you follow and want to add to a list.
- Click on the icon to the right of the “Following” button
- Select “Add or remove from lists”
- Choose the list you would like to add that person to
- If you have not yet created a list or want to create another list, here is where you can choose “Create a list” and type in the name of your new Twitter list
And there you have it, that’s how you set up Twitter lists. Easy, right?
How To Manage Twitter Lists With HootSuite
Now that you have your lists set up in Twitter, the easiest way to manage them all is with a program or app that has a columned layout. This way you can easily scroll through your lists and interact with your Twitter connections all in one dashboard.
HootSuite is a free Twitter tool that I’ve talked about before and will most likely talk about again. In HootSuite, you can set up a Twitter Tab in your account. When you do this, it will automatically add a few columns (which they call streams in HootSuite) for your home feed, mentions, direct messages and sent tweets. Those are all well and good, but we want to have a tab for columns of just our Twitter lists.
You can create a new tab from the getting started page.
In the new tab, you can then add a new stream. When the dialogue box pops up for your new stream, you can click on the tab that says Lists and choose a Twitter list. Continue to add streams to this Lists tab in your HootSuite dashboard.
Now you can log into your HootSuite account and easily read through your Twitter feed based on which segment of people you follow you want to check out.
From right in the column, you can Tweet back to that person, retweet them or send them a direct message, just like from the standard Twitter site or app.
HootSuite also offers a mobile app for when you are away from the computer and want to manage your account.
Do You Use HootSuite To Manage Your Twitter Lists?
Leave some tips in the comments below about how you manage your Twitter lists and how you recommend segmenting the people you follow on Twitter.