I picked up your book Twitter Power 3.0 and am really getting into Twitter now. Thanks. But how do you manage the non-stop fire hose of tweets?
Glad you like Twitter Power 3.0, what co-author Joel Comm and I feel is the best book on how to use Twitter as a marketing channel available today. We definitely tried to distill a lot of best practices and proven effective marketing techniques in the online world into a fun, readable and entertaining book.
What you ask, however, is really a core question for all social media and perhaps for life online overall: how do you manage to see all the important updates when they’re buried in a massive tidal surge of updates, photos, jokes, inspirational quotes and trivia? Various social networks — notably Facebook — have been experimenting for years with software that helps you with this task (that’s why some people show up in your Facebook newsfeed a lot while others have completely vanished from visibility), but Twitter is one where they still give you every tweet from every person, company and organization you follow in chronological order. Follow lots of people and it’s, well, a tsunami!
That’s why I’m a fan of something that Twitter used to make a big deal and still supports, albeit without much attention to the user experience: Twitter Lists. Makes it really easy to have hundreds or thousands of followers and still have a way to extract the tweets from the dozen or two people who are closest to you.
Problem is, it’s not the easiest thing in the world to build. So let’s go through, step by step…
First off, this is easier to do in a Web browser, so go to the Twitter home page while you’re logged in, then click on the gear icon on the top right:
See that? You probably never really noticed that there’s an entry on this menu for “Lists”. Choose it.
Now you’ll see the lists you’ve already created — if any — and where you can create a new list:
You can see on the left that I have two existing lists, “Coloradoans” and “Science Fiction Team”, with 11 and 13 members, respectively. On the right is a bit of marketing copy (don’t sell me on lists, I’m already here! 🙂 ) and the “Create new list” button.
Click on “Create new list” and give your list a name and mnemonic description:
Note at the bottom you can create a private list (appropriate for “people I actually care about” or “my real family”) or a public list where everyone on Twitter can see your list and who’s in it. For what you’re trying to accomplish, it might be more appropriate for the list to be private so that people who don’t make the cut aren’t offended or upset. Your call.
Also give the list a memorable name so you know what it’s all about. You can use 4-5 words or more, too, so you’re not in Windows 3.1 file naming world any more!
Once you’re done with these settings, click on “Save list” to create your Twitter list.
Now you need members. Okay, here’s what Twitter prompts:
Turns out this is a clumsy way to add people, for the most part, so instead, I recommend you just go back to your feed and find people who you would like to have in this particular list.
Once you do find someone, click on their name to get to their profile page (for reasons I can’t explain you can’t add people to a list directly from your feed) and click on the small gear icon adjacent to their tweet. Like this:
You can see that I’m poised to add my co-author @JoelComm to my new Twitter list by choosing “Add or remove from lists…“.
Once that’s selected, you can pick which list — or lists! people can be in more than one of your lists simultaneously — they should be in:
I’ll go ahead and check the new list “Gamer Friends”. That’s it. Done.
It’s a bit confusing because there’s also a “Create a list” button, but if you click that, you’ll be creating yet another list, not quite what you want to do.
Now here’s where this gets really helpful: Find the URL of your new Twitter list and bookmark that as your Twitter page. The url for this new Twitter list is:
As I add more people to the list, it becomes more and more helpful, but as you can see, it’s pretty straightforward to work with Twitter Lists, even if it’s confusing to get through the first time.
I hope that helps you tame your wild Twitter stream, and I encourage you to follow Joel and I on Twitter too. He’s @JoelComm and I’m @DaveTaylor.