The Inside Lane

Twitter Lists - Organising Your Followed Streams

I have been using lists as a way to organise some of the streams I follow on Twitter for some time now. But recently I decided to sort the vast majority of my followed streams into lists as together they had become a bit too much to keep up with.

For anyone unfamiliar with using Twitter lists I recommend that you at least check out this feature and get into the habit of adding streams to appropriate lists whenever you begin following one. In fact, as I have started doing, you can add streams to lists without ever following them at all.

Each list you create can contain a maximum of 500 people.

For anyone using an iPad, I have found Tweetbot to be very useful for managing lists. The native Twitter app lets you view your lists but you can’t add or remove people.

Some of the lists I have created include “Locals” for keeping up with Twitter users in my locality, “Organisations” for following companies and brands and “Celebs” because, let’s be honest, we all do a bit of that on Twitter.

I have also created a “Faves” list (Twitter won’t let you name a list “Favourites” as they already use that). So, rather than having to scroll endlessly through my timeline, I can quickly get to Tweets I know I want to read. I see this particular list as being quite flexible as I plan to add and remove people to and from it according to the time of year or what’s going on. Adding football journalists to this list during transfer windows would be one such example.

From an educational point of view, you might be interested in the following lists that I have created.

1. Education

http://twitter.com/NL_84/education

This list has been on the go for some time and currently has the maximum 500 members. It contains educators from a variety of fields all around the globe and can be a great place to find resources, interesting links, news articles, blog posts, debates and much more.

2. Education II

http://twitter.com/NL_84/education-ii

This is a second list I started after the first reached 500 members. Currently standing at 60 members, it is again full of educators of every discipline and will continue to grow as I found more Twitter users worth keeping up with.

3. Schools & Classes

http://twitter.com/NL_84/schools-classes

There are many schools and classes, including my own, using Twitter to share their work and connect globally. This list currently has 156 members, including classes from Ireland, UK, USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and more.

If you use lists yourself please leave a comment below and let me know what you think. If you know of any interesting lists to follow then also make sure to let me know.