Task – Twitter Lists

 

Lists are a powerful feature at Twitter, and if you want to use Twitter for your own purposes in the future, I think you will find lists to be very useful. You might even find some lists made by other people that you want to subscribe to! For this tip, you should have done the Twitter Following tip, and then in this tip you can create a list and see how lists are both similar to but also different from following someone.

 

Private lists and public lists. Lists can be private OR public. When a list is public lt that means that other people can see who you have added to the list, and then can also subscribe to the list if they want, which means the list will show up in their “list of lists” (but they cannot add or remove people from the list; the list belongs to you, and only you can decide who is included). So, if you decide to create a list, you can choose whether you want to make that list public or private. For the purposes of this assignment, please make a public list so that you can share your list via your blog at the end.

 

Listing versus following. A great thing about lists is that you do NOT have to follow the people who are on a list to see their tweets and retweets. If I know the person personally, I usually follow them also, in addition to their being on the list. You can decide just how you want to use the options of following and/or listing as you explore your own preferred ways of using Twitter.

 

Here are the steps to complete this tip:

 

STEP ONE: Create a list. To create a Twitter list, go to the Twitter account you want to use, and then click on Lists.

 

 

That will display a page with all your Lists. Down at the bottom of the page, you will see a link to “Create List.” When you create a list, you will be prompted to give the list a name, along with an optional description. There are all kinds of lists you could make. For example, you can make your own Game Developers list, or maybe you want to make a list of your favorite musicians at Twitter, or perhaps a list of accounts that are of interest to you based on some topic.

 

 

STEP TWO: Add accounts. Adding someone to a list is like following them: the difference is that instead of clicking on the Follow button, you instead click on the gear button next to the Follow button, and that will give you a drop-down menu allowing you to add to (or remove from) a list. Add at least two accounts to your list to make sure you are familiar with how that works.

 

 

STEP THREE. View your list. After you have added accounts to your list, take a look to see how it is working. Click on the Lists tab on your profile page, and you should see your List there. Click on the link to see the list. By default, it will show you the latest tweets from the accounts on your list, but if you look to the left-hand menu options, you will see that you can also view the list by members:

 

 

STEP FOUR: Blog. To finish up, write a blog post where you provide a link to your list and explain your process: why did you create this list and how did you find the accounts that you added? Also, let me know if you had any experience with Twitter lists before; especially if you have been using Twitter, I am curious to know if you were using lists or not. For me, they are key to using Twitter in a time-efficient way… which is always a struggle with life online: so much to keep up with, and so little time!