Creating Twitter Lists

Twitter lists are a great way to promote your friends and get more followers. If you want to keep it simple, put all of your followers in one list, then put the link in your signature for email and forums. The list will change as you add or delete members, but the link will always be up to date.

If you want to get more elaborate, create multiple lists, build a table for them, and publish it on your website like I did, here. Once you have it set up, you can put it on blogs, free pages, etc., which not only helps promote your followers, but can also get you more followers in the process. Here's a quick tutorial to get you started.

From your Twitter page, click on "Followers" (either the word or the number--they're both links). Look at your first follower.

If it's someone you want to put on a list, click the little person icon to the right of the Following button. This brings up a list of actions.

Click on "Add or remove from lists..."

Since this is your first list, there's nothing to do here but click on "Create A List". On the next screen, give your list a name and a description. (If you include the hashtag #welcometotwitter in the description, new followers from your profile will see a recommendation to follow the people in your list.)

Choose Public or Private, then Save. This not only creates a list, it should also add that first follower to it, and take you to a new screen for that list, showing this member's tweets.

To get back to your followers, click on the Home Button, at the top of your screen, then click on Followers again.

Note: You do not have to follow someone in order to put them on a list.

You can go all the way down your list of followers, creating and adding folks to your lists as you go. If you have a lot of strangers following you, use their profiles as a guide to where they should go. Followers with no profiles can be skipped. Followers with multiple interests can be put in several lists.

Note: When you add someone to a list, Twitter puts that info in the follower's Notifications. Here's how it looks:

Click the @Connect button at the top of your Twitter screen.

Interactions is selected automatically. When you look to the right, you'll see:

This is a nice gesture, if you want to impress your followers, but it is very subtle. Some folks may never see it.

Now that you have one or more Twitter lists created, you'll want to use them, which means getting a link of your list members.

Go to your profile page and click on lists.

Select the list you want to promote. This automatically takes you the tweets for your list members. This is NOT the link you want.

On the left side of your screen, click on the "Members" link. This takes you to your list of members and their profiles. This is the page you'll want to promote.

Look at the top of your screen. The URL in the address bar is the one you'll want to use to promote this list. Copy it and paste it anywhere you can publish a link--email/forum signatures, forum/blog posts, web pages, etc.--you 're good to go!