How to Follow 1000+ People on Twitter

Twitter Lists is the subject for the next couple of days.

Most people on Twitter have under 500 people that they follow on Twitter.

90 to 95% of the Twitter accounts are following less than 1000.

Then there is the other extreme, those that follow more than 10,000.

Depending on how active those people you follow are, it can get pretty ridiculous trying to keep track of the conversations and have a real life too. The tweets will just fly by and you will never be able to keep up.

So as my "list" of people that I was following grew, I stopped and took time to go thru every one of them and assign them to a Twitter list.

Go to the Twitter.com help section for details on how to create lists by clicking here.

According to Twitter, you are allowed to have a maximum of 500 per list and up to 20 lists. That would equal 10,000 people you can follow if you put each of them on a list.

Today I'll share with you how I use my lists and tomorrow I'll share with you some of the other ways you can use Twitter Lists.

I have some pretty obvious names for some of my lists like: Newsmakers, Fort Wayne Area, Marketing/Advertising, and some not so obvious names like EE and RF.

My RF list is top secret in that people have tried to guess what it stands for and those that know, want to stay on the list.

My RF list is people that I Really Follow. This limits my 1500 people I follow down to under 500 which is a reasonable number for me to follow.

It is a completely arbitrary list and it changes as I add and drop people from the RF list.

I use TweetDeck on my laptop and Tweetcaster on my Droid to monitor Twitter.

Tweetdeck on my laptop has 4 columns, they are my RF list, @mentions, Direct Messages, and the last column is usually a Facebook Friends Status Update Feed.

So, why am I following 1500 people if I'm not really following everything they say?

Because by following it allows us to have private conversations via Direct Messaging and I'm always shuffling some of those RF people on or off depending on what they are talking about.

One last tip for today about Twitter Lists. Go to your account on Twitter.com to set up and maintain your lists, not a third party application. The third party applications like Hootsuite and Twitter will pull those official Twitter lists for you, but if you only create a list in a 3rd party application, it won't always transfer to your Twitter.com account.

Tomorrow, another way to use Twitter lists that I've found helpful.