There are lots of questions tonight on twitter about lists… and what they are, and how you use them…
Very simply, twitter has added a neat bit of functionality which allows you to group your followers into lists. Twitter has just rolled out this functionality to all twitter users.
To find out how many lists you have been included on – a good measure of how engaged you are with your followers, then look at your followers and following stats – there will be a new figure – ‘lists’.
If you click on your lists number you will see who has added you to a list. For example, I like working with accountants, so have started a list called great accountants.
You may be thinking so what… well if you want to follow accountants too, you can with one click you can watch everyones tweets on this list. To illustrate this, I found that I was on a list called thames valley businesses. Since I want to connect with local businesses, I with one click followed the list. 161 within my target group that I can watch their tweets… result!
Creating a list is very slow, you have to add people 1 by 1. I’m hoping that a few twitter applications will appear shortly which will speed up the process of creating & finding lists.
If you are wondering why I haven’t created many lists… I’ve a very slow internet connection tonight, and will create lots of lovely lists next week.
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3 Comments
I love lists, but I find the biggest drawback is seeing tweets from people you don’t actually follow.
For example I removed a couple of tweeple who were filling my stream with inane ’stuff’ but because I had listed them, their tweets still appeared in Tweetdeck.
Also, others have been disappointed that I am not following them, when in fact I was reading and responding to several of their tweets.
Lists are a great idea, but Twitter still has some work to do.
Have yet to work with lists but clearly they are a way forward. Interested in Toni’s point that “others have been disappointed that she is not following them”.
Could this be the known problem with Tweetdeck – although a Twitter handle was included in one of my columns, the individuals Tweets would never appear.
Apparently Hootsuite does not suffer this problem to anywhere near the same extent.
I used (when the API was still at 100) to try to use a search to identify all my @mentions as this reduced the number of calls on the API that twitter was making. I found that several people didn’t feature in these searches. Not sure why, so knocked that one on the head. Since twitter has increased the API limit, I rarely have any problems with being too active on tweetdeck!