Twitter – Lists

In this second video about using Twitter.com, I’m gonna show you how to start following people who you may want to listen to or who you may want to keep track of and also how to do several simple Twitter commands like creating a list, retweets, and mentions, etc.

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So the first thing you can do is find people to follow. And also, of course, you want people to follow you, but generally speaking, until you start following some people, probably no one is gonna follow you. Now, if you have a blog or a popular site, then you can just put your Twitter profile link on your blog or site and get people to click on that, and they may eventually follow you. But I’m gonna show you how to follow people, assuming that you don’t know anyone and you don’t know any friends of yours that use Twitter, etc. then really the easiest way is to just search for your friend’s name or email address…I’m just gonna type in ‘John’…keep it generic; okay, so this is my search results over here. Now, it will return any post with the word ‘John’ in it. So this is really a pretty much untargeted way, but I’m just showing you an example here.

So let’s look at some of these people here. Now, this is the username of this particular person – pokergames247. So I’m gonna click on that. Alright? And I can see that this person’s name is Kim Johnson; well, this may not be the real name, but anyway, this is the name listed here – Kim Johnson from Los Angeles – and there’s also a website URL over here.

Now, I’m gonna click on Follow to follow this particular person. Okay. So now, I started following, and you can see that it says here, I started following this person. But when you start following more people in Twitter, you may end up with a lot of followers, so that makes it pretty difficult for you to browse through different followers…different people that you are following, to actually get to the messages that you really want to read.

So the easiest way to solve that is to create a list. Now, lists lets you segment your Twitter followers and also the people that you’re following in Twitter. So let me create a new list…okay? So I’ve created a new list, and you can see that this new list is accessible via @your actual name or your actual username/poker. I can give you a description if I want to, and then I can choose to make it public or private. And I’m gonna click on Create List.

Okay, so you can see, I’ve created a list here, which is “poker”, and I can click on that list to get all the latest updates from anyone that I have assigned to that particular list. And in fact, if I go back to my home page or my profile page, now I can see the new list that I’ve just created over here.

So you can even do this for existing people that you’re following. And I’m gonna assign all these guys to different lists. Okay? So I can see my existing list, ‘Poker’, but I can also create a new list…let me call this ‘Music’…create that, and now, this person is assigned to the list, ‘Music’. Now that really helps me to manage all the information that’s coming on my Twitter home page, because what you get eventually when you end up following a lot of people, and also when a lot of people start following you is that you get a lot of noise on your main Twitter profile page. So this really helps you to keep your sanity and also helps you to access the different categories of information very easily.