Finding it hard to keep up with your virtual  friends and followers? Time to regain control with our guide to Twitter lists. Marigolds at the ready, let’s get spring cleaning. 

Where do we start?

As with all things social, at the very beginning. Think about your follower audience and the accounts/people that currently make up that network. Your followers could be clients, suppliers, or dare we say it, competitors. These categories will be used to make Twitter lists i.e. to group a certain type of account together in one place, for easy reference.

Twitter lists

 

How do we set a Twitter list up?

Login to your Twitter account and click the profile icon, and then navigate to the drop-down menu item ‘Lists’.

Twitter lists 2

 

From there, you’re all systems go. Click ‘Create new list’ to start your first grouping of accounts:

Twitter lists 3

 

Your mission, should you choose to accept it…

Now one thing with Twitter lists is that you don’t want to give away the good stuff to all and sundry. Time for a bit of cloak and dagger.

Keep any private lists, private. So any lists which groups together clients, your professional assets, competitors etc should be kept out of public view and away from prying eyes. No one likes a stalker.

 

How do we add people to our shiny new Twitter list?

Members of the list can be added by searching individual accounts, or directly from your Following and Followers lists. Accounts can also be added to your Twitter lists from a specific user’s profile page:

Twitter lists 5

 

Once you’ve finished, you’ll have the one specific place to go to find all tweets posted by a specific set of people eg clients, team members, suppliers, funny cats etc. How very nifty. From there, you can start to engage with the heavyweights, check out who’s the big cheese within the group, and most importantly understand who you want to notice you, and why. We can help with the how.

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Time for a stealth move

What’s even niftier is that a lot of people have done a lot of this work for you already. Here’s how. Head to a favourite account and bingo:

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Chances are they’ll have their own set of lists too. Simply subscribe to the list(s) of your choice and hey presto, you’ve now gained access to a whole new set of curated lists. Excellent.

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Welcome to the club

It may take some time, but the rewards you’ll gain from subscribing to third-party Twitter lists and curating your own will be worth the effort. Oh, and do remember to add your own account to each of the lists you create. After all, you’re an influencer now too.