Please help us continue to provide you with free, quality journalism by turning off your ad blocker on our site.

For instructions on how to disable your ad blocker, click here.

I’ve Turned Off My Ad Blocker
BETA
This is a BETA experience. You may opt-out by clicking here
Edit Story

Twitter Enhances Lists: 4 Ways To Take Advantage

Steve Cooper
This article is more than 6 years old.
Twitter Bird Sketch

A few weeks back Twitter quietly raised the limit on the number of lists users could create from 20 to a whopping 1,000; they also boosted the number of accounts within a list from 500 to 5,000. The announcement came, appropriately enough, in the form of a tweet from their official Twitter for News account on May 30th. This announcement got me thinking about how I use Twitter lists and how other businesses could use them as well.

Before I dive into the details, I should first explain what Twitter lists are. Twitter lists are a built-in function (click the gear icon within Twitter to access them) that allow members to create their own curated group of Twitter users. This means others can add you to their lists as well. Twitter has a nice page about how to create your own lists so I won't get into those details. However, I have four basic tricks I like to employ to get the most out of my Twitter lists.

Public vs. Private: The first major decision I make when creating a list is whether or not to make that list public or private. If it's public, anyone on Twitter can see the list name (so make sure it's appropriate), as well as all the members I have added. Other users can also subscribe to the list. I have several lists that I choose to keep private since they include some items that don't need to be public and don't benefit my readers, such as personal friends. Other lists, such as marriage experts who contribute to Hitched, I like to promote. In fact, by creating a list I am able to use the Twitter widget tool and add a live list stream of marriage experts to the Hitched homepage.

Basic Lists: There are a few lists that I think everyone should have set up, either publicly or privately. My four main lists are news sources, industry sources and experts, colleagues that I work with, and personal friends. In some instances, you might find that a person or business falls into more than one list—that's okay. Remember, you might have one list that includes only 20 people, which means tweets won't get buried in an avalanche of posts, while other lists might include several hundred (or 5,000 members). You could even create subsets of your same lists: Must Read Marriage Experts (limit the list to 50 members), Marriage Experts (no limit), Money and Marriage Experts (no limit). Ultimately, these lists are to help you and your followers (or subscribers) parse the information.

Subscribe & Steal: Just as others may subscribe to lists you create, you are able to subscribe to their lists. Forbes, for example, has a list of staff that you can follow. It's okay to be a little lazy too. If you don't feel like doing the heavy lifting of creating your own list of news sources, for example, just subscribe to someone else's public list. Moreover, find a list from a trusted source within your industry and use it to find new people—I find this more efficient than Follow Friday (#FF). It's also okay to steal a list idea from others too. Browsing around I found a few creative list ideas that I might piggyback on in the future, such as, People My Friends Follow, Klout Score Above 70, and Social Media Celebs. Beware that going down this rabbit hole is addictive.

Maintenance: These lists are just another tool for your toolbox. Unfortunately, you may find that some of these tools get a little rusty over time and need to get tossed out. If you find after a month that a news source only tweets about local information when you have them in your National News list, it's time to move them. You may also find that a list that started out small has grown over the months to include too many tweeps to keep up with. This situation can be resolved by building sub-lists as mentioned above—call it your VIP list.

If you have Twitter list tips you'd like to share, please leave them in the comments below.

I'm the co-founder and editor-in-chief of Hitched, a service and lifestyle online magazine for married couples. I grew up in a stable and loving family with two working…

I'm the co-founder and editor-in-chief of Hitched, a service and lifestyle online magazine for married couples. I grew up in a stable and loving family with two working parents and saw a need for a marriage magazine while in college. I graduated from San Francisco State University with a degree in journalism and spent over six years at Entrepreneur magazine where I moved from intern to managing editor of Entrepreneur.com—all the while researching and developing Hitched. While still working at Entrepreneur, I launched Hitchedmag.com with the help of life-long friend and co-founder Gabriel Lefrancois. I quit Entrepreneur to grow my company, but have continued writing and reporting on business issues as I combine my love of journalism and passion to help promote healthy and happy marriages through Hitched.
Add Steve to your Google+ circle.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevecooper/2013/06/25/twitter-enhances-lists-4-ways-to-take-advantage/
www.forbes.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2020-16
495200
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:7UVSPX52OVDWCDEB6U2RT3OSXJSXSMFI
<urn:uuid:87808b05-e867-4829-9ee7-f465d8552eaf>
2020-04-03T06:48:09Z
151.101.250.49
text/html
sha1:H4HB5KLHTLDMNZSU7MAXLG232WBHQHVN
<urn:uuid:9bf81e8b-0de8-4af2-bc60-7d5ee1c7939f>
https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevecooper/2013/06/25/twitter-enhances-lists-4-ways-to-take-advantage/
response
<urn:uuid:ced7a1fa-3fd2-4974-a2a1-cb68bd5a3646>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2020-16
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for March/April 2020
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-18.ec2.internal
software: Apache Nutch 1.16 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.1-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: http://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/