Once you are following a few hundred people in Twitter, your timeline will start to look very cluttered and you simply won’t have time to read every tweet! Lists act as mini timelines and are great for keeping your Twitter profile organised.

There are two types of lists;

Public:

Public lists are visible on your profile and anyone can click to see who has been added. You might want to create a list of local tweeters or members of your networking group for example. But this type of list is best with the privacy settings set to public. New people in your area or prospective new members to your networking group will get value from being able to see who is on the list and quickly follow the list members.

If you have a list watching service set up in Twitter such as @ListWatcher you will also be notified whenever you are added or removed from a public list.

Private:

Private lists are not visible on your profile and the list watching service will not report additions or removals from a private list. I recommend you set up a list of prospective clients or JV partners so you can keep track of their tweets and remain in regular communication to build your relationship but you will want these lists to be private.

If your lists entitled something like ‘prospective customers’ or ‘prospective JV partners’ are public, there is a very good chance each person you add will be notified of their addition. Anyone who visits your profile will also be able to see who you are hoping to do business with or set up a joint venture partnership with! Not the best way to introduce yourself really is it?

Imagine if your biggest competitor can see who you’re courting and jumped in there first?! As Harry Enfield said “you don’t wanna do THAT!”

I like to use the rule of thumb that all lists are private unless I would be happy for my biggest competitor to see it. On that note, give careful thought to how you name your public lists too. If the person you’ve added is notified they have been added to your list named ‘[insert name here’ will they be pleased or insulted?

It is good practice to get into the habit of adding people to lists at the point when you decide to follow them. It is really laborious trying to add a few hundred people to a Twitter list retrospectively but when you do it as you go along, it takes an extra few seconds and means you will never face tweet overwhelm!

I’ve created this quick video to demonstrate how to create lists and add or remove users from the lists you have created to help you get started.