Managing Your Twitter Contacts

We all make lists: grocery lists, to-do lists, Christmas card lists, vocabulary lists—and lists of lists! However, did you know that you can use lists in Facebook and Twitter to make your life easier?

Once you have more than a handful of contacts—especially if they post fairly often—it can become a daunting task to keep up with them. And let’s face it—once things get complicated, often the easiest course of action is inaction!

I covered managing your Facebook contacts in a recent post and will focus on Twitter this time.

As with Facebook, lists in Twitter allow you to sort your contacts. It makes reading posts much easier. If you’re viewing posts directly on Twitter’s website, you can view the posts from just one list at a time. If you’re using a third party site such as Hootsuite, you can view posts from several lists at the same time.

It’s easy to create lists. One difference to note—in Facebook, no one knows the name of the list that you have put them on. However, in Twitter, they do know, so keep that in mind when naming your lists!

You can’t get too carried away as Twitter only allows 20 lists per user. You can also only have 500 users on each list. For the majority of users, though, this should be more than sufficient.

Now for a really cool thing—you can follow lists that other people create! For example, I have a list called “SocialMediaPeeps” which is made up of people on Twitter who post about social media. You could go to my Twitter Profile and follow that list. You’re not actually following those people, just the list, so the users on the list are controlled by the list creator. Lists can also be Private so others can’t follow them.

Mashable is a great resource for lists. They have their own lists—which you can follow—in addition to a huge resource of other people’s lists. If you’re looking for city-specific lists, they have those! Maybe you’re doing business in Denver, but you don’t want to start from scratch in building a list. Mashable currently has 232 lists with Denver as part of its name that you can follow.

You can also put someone on a list that you’ve created, but you don’t have to follow them. In this way, lists in Twitter are more flexible that lists in Facebook. However, in Facebook, you can make a post visible just to people on a list (or block them from seeing it). You can’t do that on Twitter.

Lists are an invaluable tool—especially in Twitter. You can easily keep track of your competitors, your industry, your peers, your customers as well as world news and trending topics.

Do you use lists in Twitter? Have you ever followed someone else’s list? What lists would you recommend that people follow?