Using Twitter Lists

Twitter’s List feature allows you to group together people by common topic (e.g. "friends", "textile designers", "news") and get an overview of what’s being said. The benefit of Twitter Lists is that you don’t have to follow people in your lists, which means your normal Twitter timeline can be kept under control. Here’s how to create a list.

Visit Twitter

Go to Twitter.com and log in if necessary. You should see your timeline (this is people you follow and your own tweets – if you’re still subscribed to the public timeline you’ll see every tweet by everyone on the planet, so you might want to change that!)

At the tip of the timeline you should see a menu called "Lists"

The Lists menu

Click on "Lists" to see a drop-down menu. You can see options to

• Create a list
• Lists you follow
• Lists following you

As you can probably tell from this, it’s possible to follow lists created by other people, which can save you a lot of effort. In other words if one person creates a list of "jewellery designers" you can follow that list (if it’s public). You can also use other people’s lists to find interesting people to follow, or add to your own lists.
At the bottom of the menu is an interesting one: lists following you. Let’s look at that.

Lists following you

This can be good for the ego. I’m on about 25 lists created by other people. I could click on those lists and see who else is on there. For example the "eas11-delegate" list is a list of people who attended a conference I was at. Maybe I met or heard someone interesting – I could go to that list and see if they’re on there and then follow their tweets.

Creating a list

Creating a list is really easy. Just select the appropriate option and give your list a name. The description is important because it helps other people know what the list is about.
You also have some privacy options. You can make the list public so that other people can find and use it, or private. Why would you want it to be private? Well perhaps you’re working on a project and want to gather all the people in that project in a list. It’s not top secret but it’s not necessarily something you want random people following, so keep it Private. Note that this doesn’t mean the tweets of the people in the list are private. If they make their tweets public, they’ll be visible to anyone. It’s only the list that’s private.

Add people to your list

So here’s my list. There’s no one on it at the moment, and no one following it. Now to find people to put on it!

Searching for people

Let’s start with looking for people by name. This only works if people use their name on their Twitter profile, as we’ll see in a minute. I’m searching for Dougie Kinnear.

It turns out there’s only one Dougie Kinnear on Twitter and it’s the one I want. I’ve now got two options. I currently don’t follow Dougie’s tweets (no offence, Dougie) so Twitter is offering me that opportunity now. Note that you do not have to follow someone to add them to a list – this is, for me, one of the attractions of lists.
If you click the little "person" icon you get some options (which also appear in other places on Twitter too so you don’t have to be in a list to add people to it).

Here are the options – you may be familiar with them already but not have understood them.
"Mention" creates a blank tweet with the person’s @username in it. Incidentally if you create a tweet that starts with someone’s username then the only people who see that tweet are the person you mention, and anyone who follows you both. If you want to create a tweet that anyone can see, put the @username after the start.
E.g. if I tweet "@person I really like your work!" then only @person will see it, and anyone who follows us both. If I tweet "I really like @person’s work" then the whole of Twitter will be able to read that. This may be good or bad… "I love @justinbeiber" is not the same as "@justinbeiber I love you!"

Finding people who don’t use their name

A lot of people (for various reasons) don’t attach their full names or real names to their Twitter accounts. Here’s one example. When I search for "Stephanie Fulke" I can’t find the Stephanie I want. But I know she’s on there! In this case you can search by user name – Steph’s Twitter username is @stephfulke and looking for this finds her.

(Incidentally, if you don’t attach your proper name to your Twitter account, you make it very difficult for people to find you! Note too that your description is a helpful way for people to find out who you are. Sometimes people send me questions or retweet me and I look at their account info to see who they are. Sometimes I make really interesting contacts that way.)

So now I can add Steph to the list.

Getting to your lists

Annoyingly it can be a bit confusing finding your lists. You need to go to your Profile page (circled above). Now if you click the "Lists" menu you’ll see an option to look at your own lists.

Here are my lists. I only have one at the moment…

The list

So here is the list. I can see all the tweets of people who are on it, even the ones I don’t follow!
Cyber stalking… what fun.

Finding lists: start with people you follow

People you follow might have made interesting lists. At the moment, Twitter doesn’t make it as easy as it used to be to find them but if you go to someone’s profile page and add "/lists" at the end you’ll see the lists they’ve made (if any).
Here are two lists made by Kate.

Clicking the green symbol next to the list means you’ll be subscribed to it.

Finding lists on Listorious

Listorious is a way of finding people and lists to follow. Here I’ve searched for "design" and found a lot of individual twitter accounts and, on the right hand side, some lists.

Using Google

If you enter this search term in Google:
site:twitter.com/*/[search term] and replace the bit in square brackets, Google will search for lists containing that search term. As you can see, there are quite a few lists using "textiles".
Note that if you are looking for jewellery lists, it’s spelt differently in some parts of the world, especially the USA! (Jewelry)

Summary

Lists are a useful feature of Twitter but for some reason they’re not as easy to use as they could be. However it’s worth making the effort to create a list or two to keep an eye on brands and companies, friends and family, potential employers or clients, or even Justin Beiber.
And by "keep an eye on" I don’t mean that in a stalkerish way!