How To Make The Most Of Twit­ter Lists

Us­ing Twit­ter is pretty sim­ple, all things considered.

But be­cause of the na­ture of its live up­date sys­tem, things can get pretty out of hand.

Go­ing through your friend’s tweets be­comes more over­whelm­ing the more friends you have.

When you add in the celebri­ties or brand pages you might be fol­low­ing, not to men­tion the fre­quency in which peo­ple up­date, and you have a real problem.

That is why you need Twit­ter lists…to keep your san­ity intact.

What Are Twit­ter Lists

Twit­ter lists are sim­ply group­ings of your dif­fer­ent friend cat­e­gories. By cre­at­ing lists, you can iso­late dif­fer­ent peo­ple into tabs that you can view on their own. This cuts down the amount of tweets you have to go through, while also mak­ing it sim­pler to post only to cer­tain groups at a time. Which af­fords you a bit of pri­vacy and con­trol over your content.

Twit­ter lists are quite sim­i­lar to Face­book lists or Google Plus Cir­cles, but there are also differences.

Table with feature comparison for lists on Twitter, Google plus, Facebook.

How To Make Twit­ter Lists

Un­der your Set­tings menu on your pro­file, as well as in the side­bar on the left, you will see one en­try ti­tled Lists. This is where every­thing for both man­ag­ing and view­ing lists is lo­cated. While there, you will see the Cre­ate Lists but­ton. Click it, and you will get a di­a­logue box on your screen that gives you the abil­ity to name the list, give it an op­tion de­scrip­tion, and make it ei­ther pri­vate or public.

If your list is pri­vate, no one else will be able to see de­tails about it. But if it is pub­lic, oth­ers can view the list from your pro­file. What is cool about that is that you can tweet di­rectly to any­one fol­low­ing cer­tain pub­lic lists, which makes it eas­ier to com­part­men­tal­ize your sta­tuses based on subgroup.

How To Make The Most Of Twitter Lists

Go Be­yond Friends and Family

Most peo­ple tend to cre­ate sim­ple lists, like friends, fam­ily, cowork­ers, ac­quain­tances, ect. Which is fine, but there are many more ap­pli­ca­tions to think about. Us­ing ex­am­ples from my own pro­files, I have lit­er­ally dozens of lists made. Some of those cat­e­gories include:

  • Ex­tended Family
  • Col­lege Friends
  • Close Friends
  • In­ter­net Friends
  • Blog Fol­low­ers
  • Blogs I Follow
  • Net­work­ing
  • Celebri­ties
  • Brands
  • News
  • En­ter­tain­ment
  • Free Stuff and Discounts
  • Weird

You can make a list for just about any­thing, and I do. That may seem weird, but the first time you re­al­ize how sim­ple it makes nav­i­gat­ing your list, you will be hooked.

Twit­ter Lists To Follow

Now that you know how to fol­low Twit­ter lists, why not start fol­low­ing some of the other lists that are al­ready pop­u­lar? Var­i­ous ac­counts have put to­gether some great ones, and you can keep up with the press of a button.

TIME-Twitter-140-2013-on-TwitterlistVer­i­fied Ac­counts has help­fully as­sem­bled the ac­counts of sixty-six (at the time of this writ­ing) world lead­ers who are cur­rently on Twit­ter from around the globe. They in­clude Ghana Pres­i­dent John Dra­mani Ma­hama, EU Com­mis­sion Pres­i­dent Jose Manuel Bar­roso, US Pres­i­dent Barack Obama, Russ­ian Prime Min­is­ter Dmitry Medvedev, and many more. Keep up with what some of the most pow­er­ful rep­re­sen­ta­tives in the world are do­ing and say­ing, from all positions.

What makes this such a great list is that it does­n’t just in­clude politi­cians, but also pub­lic ser­vants in higher ranges of power.

TIME-Twitter-140-2013-on-Twitterlis

  • Top 50 Funny

Feel like a bit of a chuckle to­day? Favs­tar has com­piled a list of ac­counts that fre­quently post funny tweets for you to en­joy. The style of hu­mor is all over the spec­trum, and in­clude many nov­elty ac­counts like Weed Hu­mor, Pimp B Clin­ton, and the of­fi­cial ac­counts by brands, celebri­ties, and more.

Not every­thing there is for every­one, but the va­ri­ety is what makes it such a great list.

  • World News Brands

If you want good lists, Robert Scoble has cre­ated a ton of them. But this one is my per­sonal fa­vorite, a col­lec­tion of news sources that is way more ex­ten­sive than my own per­sonal one. He has 200 me­dia sources listed, and if you want a real look at news around the world, in­clud­ing lo­cal­ized to dif­fer­ent re­gions, this is the per­fect fol­low for you.

  • TIME Twit­ter 140 2013

TIME Mag­a­zine re­leases a list of the most in­flu­en­tial Twit­ter ac­counts every year. This is the most re­cent, giv­ing us a peak back over what Twit­ter users were re­ally shak­ing things up over the past twelve months. It is worth fol­low­ing the 2011 and 2012 lists, too.

Have any lists you think we should be fol­low­ing? Maybe you want to talk about your own? Let us know in the comments.

By Jessy Troy

Jessy Troy is the so­cial me­dia junkie and stay-at-home mom who earns her liv­ing on­line. You can see me tweet as @JessyTroy