Note 195 – Creating useful lists in Twitter which may help you as a writer

If you have a Twitter account and follow hundreds of people, it becomes an unmanageable task of viewing all the tweets from those you are following in your timeline – they pop up every second, all day long!  I just do a quick scan down my timeline now and again and read (and sometimes retweet) ones that catch my eye. 

After a while, you may come to realise that there are a handful of accounts where you wouldn’t want to miss their regular tweets, and find it frustrating to go into each account to read them.  That’s where lists come in, and I’ve set up my first one today.

Twitter Support

To find out the proper way to do this, I read the article on the Twitter support called How to Use Twitter Lists.  In summary, you go to the profile that you want to include in a list and after clicking on the box with the drop down arrow, you can ‘add to list’.  If you haven’t got any lists set up you can create one at this point.  If you have, you can add the person to one of your existing lists. 

Private or public Twitter lists 

You can make the lists private or public.  If they are public, they can be viewed by the people that you are following in that list i.e. they will come up under ‘lists following you’ in their profile.  I created a list today and added various people by going into their profiles and selecting ‘add to list’.  Now if I want to only view the tweets from those people, I can view my list instead of trawling through the main timeline. 

Notes: 

• You don’t have to be following that person in order to add them to a list. 
• Other people can add you to their lists – this shows in your profile under ‘lists following you’.  Someone has me on a list called ‘future millionaire’ – how lovely (maybe they know something I don’t!).
• As a writer, I could set up lists such as ‘publishers’, magazines’, and ‘writing tips’.

If you are a Twitter user, please leave me a comment below and let me know how you get on with lists and if you find them useful.

This blog post forms part of my writing challenge. Don’t forget that you can subscribe to receive my daily blogs by email so that you don’t miss any. Just click ‘sign me up’ on the home page. Alternatively you can follow my blogs on Twitter or my ‘Tips and Luxuries‘ Facebook page. Requests for future blogs (punctuation/grammar/writing tips) are always welcome.

Until tomorrow…

Sandra
Freelance writer
Please visit www.sandramadeira.com for more information on my services as a freelance writer.

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