What are Twitter Lists
Posted in Social Media on 18th October 2011

There comes a point in most Twitter users experience where you find out your following several hundred people or more! Often this is the result of marketing tools that auto-follow people who are already following you. This is probably the case for a lot of you and as many of you are probably aware (or soon to be aware), this results in one highly clustered home timeline, with topics ranging from all kinds of things, often with no real relevance to you! So what can be done about cleaning up my timeline on Twitter?

You've guessed it!, Twitter Lists. These are fairly simple to use and i'll run through how to start a list. They are perfect for seperating the content of your followers. Take our account for example, we were more interested in reading about current or future web related topics, web developing, social media, SEO and the like. So what we wanted to do was to build a list that would provide a timeline in sort of just the users that we found most relevant and interesting to our cause. Your standard main timeline still exists in Twitter and is still your home page. But this list acts as a sort of mini foccused timeline, providing you with your fix of all that's going on within your industry (or the scope) of the timeline.

How to build one

Firstly on your home page you'll see a mini navigation bar that states Lists.

This now gives you the option to view your lists or create one. You can see i've already created mine, but you can just click create list

Clicking on create brings up a box similar to this

Here, give your list a name and description so you can identify its purpose. You also have the option to make it public or private, simply a public list allows somebody else to follow it, which I think is a nice touch and saves you some time!

Now you're ready to add people to it, there are a few ways to do this depending on what screen you're on, but for this example I pulled up all my Twitter followers and then clicked on the option button.

Now I can add this person to a list, which brings up this screen


and that's it your list is up on the move!