By Princess Jones
The best thing about Twitter is how fast it moves. And the worst thing about Twitter is how fast it moves. It takes a lot of work to keep up with it. But you have to do it if you want to use Twitter as an effective marketing tool.
Lists are great when you’re managing a large Twitter feed. You can focus on tweets from certain groups or just clean up your feed altogether. All you have to do is open your Twitter list you’ve curated and you’re able to interact with a focused feed. You can make a list for your employees or for potential clients. You can make lists for your industry or for your competitors. The possibilities are nearly endless.
Making a List
The first step is to making a Twitter list is coming up with what you want your list to focus on. Keep you topic as specific or as broad as you’d like. Then open your Twitter profile. Click on “Lists.” Then click “Create a new list.”
On the next screen, enter the list name. Then write a short description of the list. (This will help others figure out whether they want to subscribe to your list or not.) Finally, choose whether this list will be public or private. (If your list is about anything you wouldn’t want your followers to know about, go with private. You can always change it later.) Click “Save List.”
Now that you’ve got the list in place, it’s time to add some profiles to it. That’s pretty easy, though. Any time you encounter someone you want to add to your list, click their profile. Then open the settings wheel in the corner. Click “Add or Remove from Lists.” Then choose the list you want to add them to. Now you’ve got a new addition to your list. Keep adding new profiles to your lists to keep them fresh but make sure to stay on theme or you’re wasting your time.
Subscribing to a List
You don’t have to make every single list yourself. You can also subscribe to other people’s lists. This is super helpful if you’re maybe looking for new people to follow or you don’t want the work of curating lists yourself.
To subscribe to a list, first you have find one you like. You can find lists published on websites in your industry. You can also use the search function on Twitter. I’ve found that the best source of lists are the people I’m already following.
To open a list, just click the Twitter profile and look for the lists link across the top of the feed. Click “Lists” to display the public lists of that user. (If they keep their lists private, you won’t be able to see them.)
When you open each list, you’ll see a feed of the current tweets of the members. You can also click on the lower left to see members of the list or people who subscribed to that list. When you’re to ready to subscribe to yourself, click “Subscribe” on the left side of the screen. If you ever want to unsubscribe, you just click the same button.
For more Twitter tips, browse these Twitter articles that are packed with best practices and useful insight.
