Get Organized: How to Create and Use Twitter Lists


The ability to create Lists in Twitter is a feature that's seriously underutilized. Lists help you organize your Twitter feed so you can see tweets coming from people with specific interests and expertise, or that you might for any reason categorize into a group.

Here, I briefly explain (in both the video and text that follows) how to create and manage Twitter Lists. Then I give several examples of types of lists you might create and why they'll make your Twitter reading a more organized experience.

How to Create a Twitter List

1 Sign into your Twitter account. These steps are essentially the same whether you're using Twitter on a Web browser or in the mobile app.
2 Click the gear icon in the upper right and select Lists.
3 On the page that opens, look for the button "Create new list" on the right. A pop-up box will appear asking you to name the list, give it a description, and mark it either public or private. I'll give some examples of lists in the next section.
4 The next page that appears will show you a blank list: no members, no followers, no tweets—nada. You can use the search box featured front and center to look for people to add to your lists, and you can add (and remove) users from your lists as you actually use Twitter, making changes to your list at any time.
5 As you use and explore Twitter and find accounts you want to add to your list, click the gear icon that appears on any user and select "Add or remove from lists."

I recommend looking through the list of people you currently follow to see if you want to group any of them into a list. You might also search for a hashtag and add the resulting users who pop up to make a list. You could also look at other user's accounts to see who they follow or who follows them and find people to add to your lists that way. The exploration method is entirely up to you. I'll give some more concrete suggestions for how to add Twitter list members in a moment.

And that's pretty much it. So let's get to what makes Lists so useful.

How to Follow Someone Else's List
There are many beautiful things about Twitter Lists, and one of them is that you don't have to build all your lists yourself. You can subscribe to other people's lists. So, say you visit the Twitter page of a really smart person, like tech writer Dan Patterson.

You can subscribe to any of his lists, such as curated lists of people who tweet primarily about comic books or science, and Twitter will essentially bookmark that list for you so you can visit it easily any time.

Why Twitter Lists Are Different From Your Feed
Twitter lists are useful because they let you see tweets from a select group of users. Think of lists almost like alternative Twitter logins, where you have a unique set of people you are following. You could have a list, for example, of just your real-life friends so that when you want to use Twitter to socialize with people you actually know, you don't have to wade through other non-friend tweets in your main Twitter feed.

Two very important things to know:

1. You don't have to be following a user in order to add him or her to a list.
2. Tweets from your lists do not show up in your primary feed.

Did you get that? If you find Twitter accounts that you are interested in reading from time to time, but you don't want to see every single thing they tweet in your primary feed, you can cordon them into a list and visit that list to read those tweets when the time is right for you.

Examples of Lists
Here are some examples of types of Twitter Lists you might create or subscribe to that others have created.

News sources. Groups of Twitter accounts tweeting news is one of the most common kinds of lists. You can create Lists with local news, global news, or even specific types of news, such as technology or science. For more related tips, see my recent Get Organized article on how to clean up your news feeds.

Competitors. Ah ha! If you're a small business owner, perhaps now you see the beauty of adding accounts to a private list to easily check in on what they're tweeting, without anyone else knowing you're keeping tabs on them.

Friends and family. Don't let your real-life friends get lost in your Twitter feed. Create a list just for them.

Colleagues or co-workers. You'll always seem like you're in the know if you follow your co-workers or esteemed colleagues on Twitter, and your life will be much easier if you have one central place to check in on all of them at once.

Topics of interest. Similar to how you might follow news, you might also follow bloggers, sports teams, authors, and other people who tweet about a particular topic of interest to you. For example, I follow a lot of people in the food world, specifically in Australia (not for any reason other than curiosity), and it's easy to see the trends happening there when I can drill down into all the Aussie food tweeters via a List. You might also consider making a list for humor or a private list of #NSFW ("not safe for work") tweeters.

Additional Resources
For more ways to organize your social media and digital life, see:

