What I know about Twitter Lists

Firstly, I'll put my hand up and admit that I love lists, I use them all the time, not just for shopping, but for planning, prioritising, the list of lists is endless! 

This inclination means that when it came to lists on twitter, I figured they might be something I would be interested in.

In my humble opinion everyone on twitter should use lists and here's what I've learned to date, and why people should use them:

Firstly they lend themselves to the divide and conquer idea, because if you put someone in a list, instead of browsing through miles of tweets everyday, you can read them in a logical format.  For example, if you follow a number of News sites, you can put all of them in a list called 'News', this makes looking through the news tweets easier than when they are mixed in with other tweets.

You can also read your tweets in a manner of their importance to you - lets say you put all your blogpals or friends in one list, or have a number of favourite writers, again you can create 2 more lists marked, 'blogpals/friends' & 'favourite writers' list.  This means that if time is short you can log in, and in an instant see what people in these two lists have tweeted over let's say the last 24 hours.

A note of importance here, when you create your lists, you can have them as public lists, or private lists.  At the moment, I have all my lists as private, but this will probably change.  Like for example, if I change my list marked 'Irish Writers' to a public list, then others can follow it.

The other thing that I have decided about lists, is that it is better to allocate followers to a list from the get go, because it sorts out having to do a lot of housekeeping later.

You can also have someone in more than one list, they can be in a list called 'thriller writers' and also in a list called 'writers who blog'.

You can also have someone on a list and not be a follower.  Once you put them on a list, their tweets will appear, whether you follow them or not.

You can change your listings at any point, so a follower could start off in one list, for example 'Art' and end up being in 'pals/friends'.

So finally, this is how you can create a list, and place your followers/people you follow in them.

If you click on a follower, then you will see their profile etc on the right. To the right of the 'Following Button' you will see a link button with an envelope on it, and to the right of that, a link button with the top of a person, (head and shoulders) - click the dropdown arrow and click on 'Add to list'.  If you have a list created already and you want to place this follower in it, just tick the box beside your list title.  If you haven't got a list created, or if you are only starting to create lists, after you click 'Add to list' - then click on 'Create a list'.  Once you choose this, type in the name you want applied to this list, type in a description if you want one.  Your list will automatically be created as a public list, but if you want it to stay private for now, under privacy, just click on the 'private' option, then save list.

All very easy.  Just to note here, this is not an extensive post on all about lists, because there is a lot about them, I still havn't figured out yet, but when I do, I'll let you know all about it.