How comfortable are you with Twitter Lists?
Do you understand the purpose of Listorious?
If not, have no fear, we’re going to dive right into both topics right here, right now:
Lists are Recommendations of Cool People
The point of using Twitter Lists is to divide people into relevant groups, like ‘social media’ or ‘marketing’ or even just ‘family’. So for example if I’m an architect (looking at you Bob Pomeroy) and want to create a list of all the people who work at my awesome design and building firm, Birdseye Building, then I can share the list with people who will find the teams tweets interesting.
You can also use Twitter Lists as a collaboration tool.
Let’s say you want to group all of your marketing friends together to tweet about a conference or a specific topic. Using a Twitter List will let people check in to a stream that’s completely dedicated to one topic. And here’s another reason people will follow your list:
Lists allow you to ‘follow people you aren’t following’.
In other words you can subscribe to a list and follow a certain group of people without following them individually. This is cool if you like to dial into to a conversation from time to time, but don’t want certain people in your main Twitter stream (like people who send rapid-fire tweets). So the bottom line is that Twitter Lists are a way of managing groups of people you want to share with people on Twitter.
Create a List
Creating lists is easy. Once you’re logged into Twitter, head over to the right hand sidebar and look for the heading that says “Lists”, then click “Create New List”.
Once you click create list, a pop-up will appear asking you to name the list and mark it as public or private. Be careful when naming the list, because the name you enter is also the title for the list URL, like this: “twitter.com/username/list-name“.
Private and Public — this should be self-explanatory. Private lists can only be viewed by people you invite, while public lists may be seen by anyone (all of my lists are public, but I guess you could make them private if they’re intended as a collaboration tool and not meant to be shared widely).
So you have a list. Congratulations! Now let’s show you how to manage it.
Manage Your Twitter List
Now that your list is created it will appear in the right hand sidebar on your Twitter profile. It’s easy to add people to this list; all you need to do is visit someone’s profile (you must be logged in to do this, remember) and click the ‘Lists’ tab that is to the right of the ‘Follow’ button below the persons profile picture. Once you select ‘Lists’ a drop down menu will appear with a check box next to each one of your lists. This way you can select as many lists as you want the person to appear on. That’s all there is to it, once you check the box the person is added to your list.
Now back to your own profile.
You’ll see all of the lists you created on the right hand sidebar under ‘Lists’. If you want to see what is happening with each list, just click on it and the stream from all the people named to the list will appear on your page. You can also go to the list page by clicking ‘View List Page’, which is located under the update button. The lists page is useful if you want to edit it for any reason, like changing it’s name — which also changes the url! — or updating the list description.
So there you have it, you’re now ready to enter the Twitter Lists battlefield. But one more thing…
Listorious is for Finding and Following Lists
Listorious is like the Yellow Pages of Twitter Lists. It is a searchable directory you can use to discover new lists by category, and find popular lists others are following too.
Once you’ve got the handle of creating your own lists, try heading over to Listorious to check out new people and topics to follow. This is a great source of inspiration for a lot of people (new blog topics, new colleagues, etc). And if you’re still not satisfied, check out the TweetMeMe Lists directory for another alternative.
Have you added the Social Media Commando to your List?