Wrangling Twitter Lists

TL;DR

One cool feature of Twitter that seems pretty underutilized by most people I ask are lists. With the advent of the awesome Tweetbot and its ability to switch quickly between my Timeline view and list views, I’ve made it a point to clean up and organize my lists and take the opportunity to trim down my followers a bit.

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I’m of the camp that believes in quality over quantity when it comes to following people on Twitter. I don’t participate in reciprocal following because that will very quickly lead to a point where your timeline is just noise. I’d much rather follow 300 quality people/organizations than 10,000 average or sub-par ones. If I am following you, it’s because I genuinely believe you have something interesting to contribute and occasionally I’ll engage you on these topics whether it’s through discourse or asking a question.

However, there’s always the occasional product announcement or contest that I want to keep track of and that’s where I use lists. The great thing about lists is that you can add someone to a list without having to follow them, thusly freeing up precious space on your timeline for what really matters to you. You only view tweets from these lists when you select them from your Twitter client of choice—most of which, I’d wager, support this functionality.

People who have been using TweetDeck for years will probably liken this to the deprecated method of putting people in groups but this is a lot more flexible and not limited to a single client. The only (possible) caveat is that you can’t DM people you just put into lists, but that’s really not a problem unless they’re following you as well. Now go forth and clean thy timeline!