Ok, I realize that not everyone that reads these posts are twitter users. So if you're not a twitter user, you can safely click on the next link and read something more interesting. If you are a Twitter user, then this will probably still be boring for you unless you're a geek like me. Still with me? Kewl. Lets get to the good stuff.
So how many people use Twitter Lists, raise your hands? Ok, just one guy in the back. Not bad. That's more than I was expecting. How many people even know that Twitter has a "lists" feature? hmmmmm looks like a few more hands went up. Kewl. Would you use the "lists" feature if I could show you even 1 way that you could improve your twitter experience with this feature? Yeah? Ok, now we're cooking with gas.
Well, here's a brief summary of the things you can use lists for:
- Filter the tweets you want to follow
- Quickly search through your the followers on your list to find someone you want to send a tweet to
- Meet other people by searching through their lists (that share common interests)
- Follow other peoples lists to save yourself time
- Create lists based on a list someone else has created
- Reduce the number of people you follow by adding them to a list so you can read their tweets without having to follow them
Before we begin, I should point out that I use Twitter directly from their page in my browser. I don't use TweetDeck or any of the other applications that are out there that may also provide alternatives to using lists. I also utilize a browser that lets me take advantage of 'tabbed browsing'. This in itself makes the list feature easy for me to take advantage of.
Also note: If you can't make out what is in any of the screen captures I have included here, just click on the image and it will blow it up to a larger size in a new window.
The first thing we need to do is show you where your lists can be found on your twitter page. If you open up Twitter into a browser page, you can find the "lists" feature on the right hand side of your window.
As you can see from this clip of my lists, you can create a list based on anything you want. I have filters for things like Canadian Olympic Athletes, Survivor Enthusiasts, Hockey etc. I have created these lists to group people by different classifications or interests. People who enjoy watching or chatting about Survivor get a list, as do Olympic athletes, and fellow hockey enthusiasts. The great thing about lists, is that a person can belong to more than one list.
Now you might be thinking to yourself.
"Ha! I don't need lists, I can just create a Search to find people talking about any of those topics! I can search on hockey, or #hockey or #CalgaryFlames or anything that relates to hockey. So I don't need to create a list! So there! Take that fool!"
Well, I won't disagree with you there. Certainly you can create and save searches to find content you are interested in. With a search you can find a tweet by a person that normally doesn't chat about that particular topic. This person may show up only once in your search. Neat.
However, I still like using a list so that I can find the people that tweet regularly about a topic I'm interested in. They may tweet about other things, but the people that fall into my lists are usually enthusiasts, and often offer a more knowledgeable opinion, or even just a more entertaining opinion about the topic I've listed them about. Having them on a list means that I can find them more quickly and tweet with them even if they haven't posted anything about the topic I'm interested in. I can initiate conversation with the enthusiast without waiting for them to show up on a search. Ok, I'll admit that it's a subtle difference from using a Search filter, but to me it's an import difference and makes using lists that much more valuable to me.
Now that I have created a bunch of lists I can then open up each list in its own browser tab window. Each window represents people who've I've filtered out based on content that I'm interested in. Then I can flip to the tab I want - refresh it - and read only content from those people. Wait... what if I have a Survivor list and it's a Tuesday and no one is chatting about Survivor? Well, the answer seems obvious to me. I usually don't scan through my survivor list till Thursday or Friday when there is likely to be chatter about that topic! So it's not like I will have a tab open for every single list I have, all at the same time. I may only open 3 or 4 depending on who I want to interact with.
So how do you create a new list? Well there's a few ways actually, but here's how to accomplish a couple of them.
When you see your "lists" on the right hand side of your twitter feed, you will notice at the bottom of the section there are a couple of options. New List and View All. Click on New List
Then you will get this window:
Create your list name, add a description if you wish, and determine whether or not you want it available as public or private content. Once you've done that, you can begin to add people to your list.
The second way to create and add people to a list, is to select a specific Twitter User and add them directly from their page. For instance, if I find Ashton Kutcher on twitter (@AplusK) I will see a drop down for lists from his profile.
Click on the lists drop down and then either add him to one or more lists that you already have, or click on New List and create one on the fly for him there.
Easy! Just like that, you now have 2 ways to create and add people to lists in Twitter!
Next question please!
"What else can I do with lists?"
Well, I'm glad you asked. A neat thing about lists is that you can look at the lists other people have made public. Maybe they have a list for something that you are also interested in. You can then follow this list without having to create one for yourself. You can also see who's on their list and follow them if you wish. In his way you are now adding to the number of interesting people you read tweets from. Additionally you can also add the people on their list to an aggregate of your own list! Lets take a look at some examples.
Ashton Kutcher only has 2 lists that he follows (and is on thousands of lists himself).
You can see in the above image he has a list for "end-slavery" and "katalysthq" (which is a business endeavor he's involved in). If we click on katalysthq we can take a look at the tweets from that list and also see who's on the list itself.
From here we can choose to follow the list or see who he's following, and if we're really curious we can see who has decided to follow the list - katalysthq (that one Ashton has made).
To give you a better example of how I made use of this feature, I want to show you my Olympic lists. When the Olympics were being hosted in Vancouver this year, people were crazy about all things Vancouver, and anything related to the Olympics themselves - including the athletes. Someone had taken it upon themselves to create a list of all the Olympic Athletes that had twitter accounts. I stumbled up this list and went - "Hey this is pretty cool! Now I have a feed that shows me all the tweets from the athletes as the games are going on!" Then I thought to myself "This would be even cooler if I could just read the tweets from Canadian athletes." So I decided to pillage from the list that was already created. I could then figure out which of the people on his list were Canadians, and create my own list from those entries. Later on as I discovered new Canadian Athletes, I could then add them to the list.
I found the @verified/olympians list and decided to take a peek at who it was following:
Now I notice that Stephanie Rice is at the top of the list. I have several options. I can now follow this person myself, or add her to a list of my own (even creating one on the fly), or just browse over to her profile and see what kind of stuff she chats about. If it's interesting then I might be motivated to add her to one of my lists.
As you might imagine, the people on this list may not have things that I'm interested in reading about on a daily basis. So as you've probably figured out by now, you don't have to follow everyone you have on your lists.
Let that sink in for a moment. You don't have to follow them to add them to a list.
"Meh, Big deal" you say.
Well the biggest advantage that one little detail offers, is a way to trim back your main stream of tweets. I only follow about 200 people and I find that my twitter stream is packed with tweets, most of which are relatively mundane and not all that interesting. I follow @thatkevinsmith The guy can be a prolific tweeter. Sometimes his tweets will flood my stream. Kevin has tweeted over 8500 times!! He hasn't been on twitter more than about a year or so. Some mornings I will wake up and see 20 or 30 tweets in a row, just from him!! I find him entertaining, but hey... that's just me.
Some people will actually unfollow him because he tweets too much for their pleasure. I can understand this, but I like having his tweets in my main feed. If it really bothers you, there are two options that you can use to still follow his tweets without having to follow the guy. 1. Create a search for his id, or 2. create a list and stick him on it. Maybe you have a list of people that are prolific tweeters, like @thatkevinsmith and @Alex_Ruiz and want them all on one list. So there you go. Stick them on that list, un-follow them and they no longer fill your stream with their wisdom. Yet you can still read up to the minute tweets from them by having them in a list that you pop open in it's own tab. Voila!
By taking advantage of this feature, I have lists with all kinds of people on them. I don't follow everyone that is on those lists and as such the number of people that I follow is pretty manageable. Hopefully they are not insulted if I don't follow them directly, but there are a ton of people that follow me and visa versa that I hardly ever interact with. Why keep a stream of tweets from people that I don't chat with on a daily basis? I can still interact with them by keeping them on a list and at the same time, keep my main stream fairly clean.
I think twitter might move in this direction more and more as people figure out how to take advantage of the "lists" feature. People will follow less people, have more lists and use them better to their advantage.
There is one more benefit I'd like to point out to you. Its about finding a specific person in your follow list. Unfortunately twitter has not implemented a search feature for you to find someone in your follow list or your followers list. If you have more than a 100 followers, it can be very cumbersome to flip through page after page to find a specific person you want to send a tweet to. However, if you have a dozen or so lists and they happen to be on one of them, you can then flip to a smaller subset of your bigger "following/followers" list. Instead of searching through a thousand followers, you can search a list with only 20 people on it. Searching through that list is way easier than tracking them down in your main list. Not perfect, I'll admit, but still better than nothing. Hopefully twitter will implement a search feature sometime in the future to accomplish this instead.
So to recap, here's the things I talked about in this post and the ways you can use "lists" to your advantage:
- Filter the tweets you want to follow
- Quickly search through your the followers on your list to find someone you want to send a tweet to
- Meet other people by searching through their lists (that share common interests)
- Follow other peoples lists to save yourself time
- Create lists based on a list someone else has created
- Reduce the number of people you follow by adding them to a list so you can read their tweets without having to follow them
I hope this has been helpful and informative even if it has been a long winded read.
Cheers!
No comments:
Post a Comment