How to Use Twitter Lists

Although it’s been around for nearly 7 years, Twitter’s lists feature is an often overlooked and underused tool for businesses and marketers alike. However, Twitter lists are an extremely useful tool for managing your Twitter account and optimising your social media marketing. You can create multiple different lists and segment them depending on type or audience.

When you go onto the lists feature in your Twitter account (or add it on a social media monitoring tool such as Hootsuite), you’ll be able to see all members of that list, subscribers if it is public, and most usefully, a stream dedicated to only their tweets. This is the most handy feature as you’re able to see all their tweets of members in that list in one stream – think of it like a Twitter filter!

To make a Twitter list:

1. Click on your profile icon to show the drop down menu.
2. Click on Lists.
3. Click Create new list.
4. Select a name for your list, and a short description of the list. Then select if you want the list to be private (only accessible to you) or public (anyone can subscribe to the list).
5. Click Save

To add or remove people from your lists:

1. Click the gear icon on an account’s profile to display the drop down menu.
2. Select Add or remove from lists. (You don’t need to be following an account to add them to your list.)
3. A pop-up will appear displaying your created lists. Click the checkbox next to the lists you would like to add the account to, or uncheck the lists you’d like to remove the account from.

Keep track of your competition

With Twitter lists, you can keep an eye on your competitors’ activity without actually following their account. Twitter lists allow you to view a stream of the tweets produced by those in the list, so by adding your competitors to a private list you can sneakily keep track of their recent activity. You can also block users if you don’t want them to see your tweets so they can’t do the same to you if they had the same idea. Although this is still completely allowed and above board, though we suggest proceeding with caution, as in most cases it is unnecessary and does mean there could be no future interaction on Twitter, which may prevent opportunities for discussion or debate where it is appropriate.

Maintain client relationships

Similar to your competitor list, you can create a list of your clients, make sure it’s private, to keep up to date with their latest news and activities. Creating a client list can help you to maintain your client relationships by seeing all their posts and updates in one place, meaning you never miss a tweet!

Stay up to date with the experts

Industry influencers are those in your field that are widely regarded as an expert in their particular subject. Not only can these people be a good source of content for your own account, but by staying up to date with their latest news, opinions and analysis you can make sure you are following the latest industry trends without spending ages crawling various industry websites.

Have any Twitter list tips? Share them with us on Facebook and Twitter!