I don’t know about you, but I live in the wrong timezone.
A lot of the people I follow on Twitter live in Asia or in the US and I feel I’m always missing a lot while I’m sleeping. As soon as you start following more than 200 people, it becomes hard to “catch up” on your Twitter timeline. Some days I do it, and go through the 6 or 7 hours I wasn’t around and read their tweets. Some days, I just don’t have the time.
I know a lot of people use Twitter lists. Some only read tweets from their Twitter lists. So if you’re not in their lists, sorry, but you’re out.
So, here I am, only following 350 people, and I am stuck. I value all the people I follow, and I don’t want to put a label on anyone. I don’t want to exclude anyone either.
Here is the question of the day: should I use Twitter lists? How do you pick the people you put in your lists? How do you make sure you don’t “miss out” on other people’s tweets?
Now, if you don’t use Twitter lists, how do you manage to not spend 2h catching up on what everyone said during the night?
I am listening 🙂
Hi Natalie,
For me, the best thing about Twitter is it’s flexability. It can be used in many different ways. This is demonstrated perfectly with the lists function.Twitter is full of interesting people who are sharing interesting tweets. I can 100% confirm that there are more people worth following on Twitter than it is possible to keep track of what they are all saying, especially in one home feed. Doing so is an impossible task.
I’ve spoken to hundreds of nice people and read hundreds of interesting tweets/links from different users. I know that I am never going to be able to read everything they are saying but I still want a way of categorising them so that I can consume whatever type of information I want at any given moment.
For example, if I want to read tweets from people who share great social media and marketing tweets, I will look in the list I have for them. If I want to read tweets from people who live in my hometown, I will look in the list I have for them. If I want to read tweets from family and close friends, I will look in the list for them. If I want to read tweets from co-workers, I will look in the list for them. There are many more lists that I could too such as jobs, sport and news.
There is literally so much great information being shared on Twitter that I don’t want to miss out on, and I need a way to organise it. Whenever I’m online, I can quickly see what good social media posts have been shared, quickly see what my friends are saying and quickly see what is happening back home. Trying to trawl through every tweet to find the subject I’m after would be extremely difficult.
If I’m on the move or have a spare five minutes, I might quickly look at my home feed and see what is happeneing in the world exactly that minute. If I have a little more time on my hands, I can choose what information I see.
I know an awful lot of people who use lists for similar reasons: lots of great people worth following and so much interesting information being shared – managing it effectively is a must.
I think without lists, you may be limiting yourself to a smaller network of people and a smaller stream of useful tweets. I know how much you enjoy using Twitter to learn and to find out the latest news – lists would help you so much in these areas.
I’ll stop talking now, and hopefully other people may also add opinions, but without lists, my Twitter experience wouldn’t have been as enjoyable, it would have been harder to control, I would have found it harder to maintain relationships, I would have found it harder to find useful information and I would have benefited far less.
Thanks
Rob
Rob,
As always, so insightful, thank you.
I’ve been trying to go through my followers today and try to “organize” them into lists…really hard! haha.
I guess if I do that from now on with new followers, it won’t take a lot of effort and hopefully I will be more productive while reading my tweets.
Thank you again for your reply and talk to you soon.
Natalie
Definitely use lists but Id recommend also using hootsuite/tweetdeck or another aggregator to separate your tweets into streams based on lists, search topics, hashtags, specific people…its the only way to manage a large following across many interests..
Hey Jon,
Thanks for your reply! Really helpful. I am using Hootsuite, so I’m finally using the tab function for what it was made 😉 ..it was about time! lol.
Thank you again for dropping by and I hope you come back soon 🙂
Natalie