The Real Reason Twitter Lists Exist ?

Tuesday I mentioned how I use Twitter Lists to keep the people I follow organized.

Everyone I follow, I put on 1 or more lists.

However remember that there are very few hard and fast rules regarding social media including Twitter.

There is another way to use Twitter Lists to follow subjects or topics without following the individuals.

Let's take a trip to Twitter.com again:

Twitter users can organize others into groups, or “lists”. When you click to view a list, you'll see a stream of Tweets from all the users included in that group...

Note: you don't need to follow another user to add them to a list; if you want to read a user's Tweets but not see their messages in your main timeline every day, lists allow you to do that. Similarly, following someone else's list does not mean you follow all users in that list. Rather, you follow the list itself.

How do you find a list?

How about creating one yourself:

Adding or Removing People From Your Lists

You can add users (including yourself!) from anywhere you see the list drop-down on someone's profile. This includes the following:

• People searches
• Profile pages (including your own)
• Yours and other users followers and following lists

Check the boxes of lists you want to include that person in. Uncheck the box if you want to remove them from the list.

Or you can do a hashtag search. A couple weeks ago, my wife and I were watching a TV show and we wanted to see what people were saying about it so I added a column to my tweetdeck #greysanatomy.

For the next hour the comments on Twitter went flying by due to the special "musical version" of the show that was airing. I didn't need to follow each individual, just the list.

For more tips and hints on Twitter Lists, click here.