ISP Media Blog

The now well recognised Twitter Lists feature is a great way to organize the people you’re following on Twitter, or find new people. In reality these lists are actually Twitter’s version of a “groups” feature, offering an easy way to cluster other users on Twitter into groups allowing you to get an overarching view of what they are up to without having to filter through your vast followers list or visiting each and every profile.

Lists are not just static listings of users, rather compilations of feeds from a specified set of users that you choose. What this means is that you can create a live feeding snapshot of the tweets from your users by viewing a specific list’s page. Lists are a great way of organising the people you are following into topic based groups. Lists also have the great benefit of allowing you to include people that you are not following!

There is a whole swag of reasons for developing your own set of lists and you can make your lists public or private to accommodate your varying needs.

Below are some tips on how to use lists:

Follow Industry Leader Trends
Lists are a great way to follow leaders in your industry to find out what they are tweeting about, ensuring you stay at the top of your game and up to date for your clients.  For example we have created a list of our industry leading “look to” tweeters on social media http://twitter.com/#/list/ISPMedia/getsocial

Create a Topic Focused Group
Create private or public lists so you can follow topics of interest, for example, ISP Media has created a public list called http://twitter.com/home#/list/ISPMedia/webwisdom which follows our favourite web wisdom providers. A topic can be anything you want, i.e. friends, co-workers, hobbies, family or employees.

Perform The Sneaky Follow
Something I personally love about lists is the sneaky follow, what I mean is that you do not have to be following someone to include their feed in your list! Brilliant right? This is particularly useful for the over achiever tweeter, i.e.  the person who does provide great tweets … just too many or in huge batches with no spacing! By adding them to your list your main feed is not clogged and you can check in on them within your list when you want to, or have time to wade through their 400 daily tweets!

Recommend Your Favourite Tweeps
A major reason for lists was to allow people to recommend other users to follow, by placing your favourite tweeps in a list and making it public, you are basically recommending them to anyone who is interested. People who visit can choose to follow the list or the individual Tweep!

Those of you who know me will be expecting this, become a voyeur first if you are unsure or new to lists! Take the time to follow a few lists and watch how they work before you leap in. then shed your baby feathers and start listing like there is no tomorrow!

It is a really great way to filter the massive influx of information that you receive through Twitter!

Lists Ahoy!