Building a Twitter following is a vital part of any Proactive Writer’s long term plan for building an online presence.
However, keeping track of followers past the magic 150 mark is impossible. This is where twitter lists can be very handy.
If you use Twitter clients such as hootsuite, tweet deck or Seesmic to control your Twitter life you will be pretty familiar with the concept of grouping. These clients allow you to collect your followers into different groups, and then follow these in their own mini-streams. This is very handy for filtering out the noise and keeping focused on the followers that can offer you the most value.
Late last year Twitter introduced Twitter lists. In essence this allows you to group your followers at the heart of the twitter system, in the same manner as the grouping feature seen in Twitter clients. The one difference is that you have the choice to either let followers know they have been listed, or to keep the whole thing private.
For me Twitter lists offer one big advantage, they are saved globally. This means that unlike Twitter clients no matter how I access Twitter I can still see my lists. With this in mind I would suggest serious Twitter users should start paying much more attention to lists.
I would suggest you start with three basic ‘private’ lists (we don’t want your followers seeing them!):
- Important - You wish to pay attention to these followers,
- Interesting - You wish to keep up-to-date with what is being said,
- Ignore - You wish to ignore these,
My tactic would be to keep an eye on the ‘important’ stream and dip in and out of the ‘interesting’ stream. Of course, the manner and depth of your grouping is up to you, but I promise it will alter your twitter experience.
Do people already use groups? How do you group your followers?