Of all the social networking platforms out there, Twitter is by far my favorite. Twitter seems to be where the buzzing hive of the modern world resides and, while I can choose to only focus on a few users by following them, others are able to introduce themselves to me through @mentions.
One of the most underplayed features of Twitter is the Lists. I see myself listed by a few users (thank you) and I keep a list of my own in place of the usual “Follow Friday” tradition. But it feels like Twitter Lists are a feature looking for a purpose.
What can I do with Twitter Lists? Are they for me or my followers? And who has time to keep them updated?
I can answer the third question now. “Who has time to keep their Twitter Lists updated?” You do… thanks to Formulists.
Formulists is one of the web services outside of Twitter that helps you make your whole experience a lot better. It offers a new and effortless way to create and manage those lists. It works by allowing you to instantly sort the people you follow and others you might be interested in. The lists it creates are auto-updated and based on formulas you create using criteria such as location, keywords in user profiles, activity, number of followers and more.
This allows you to create lists that filter and focus on the people you might want to get to know or network with on Twitter.
The other day I set up Formulists to create a list of all the people who follow at least 12 of the WebBeat.TV and GeekBeat.TV hosts, bloggers and staff—I call it ‘Beat Peep Friends. It took a while for it to compile the followers of almost 20 popular geeks and then filter it down to just the few people who follow 12 of them, but it did it. I have the list I wanted. The cool thing is, if today you started following enough of us to hit the 12 ‘Beat Peep minimum, you’d be automatically added to that list the next time it was automatically updated. I don’t have to do a thing.
Yay, lazy me!!
Another example that the folks at Formulists shared with me was, say your local restaurant created a list to filter the locals (by looking for the name of your town in Twitter bios) or “foodies” (again, looking at their bio) they follow into a list they can then focus on more closely. Alternatively, they can use Formulists to discover new potential local customers by seeing the top common followers of local competitors.
So to answer question one, “What can I do with Twitter Lists?” There are so many possibilities here and they will get you looking at your lists every day to see who has been added and what they’re tweeting about.
I set up another list for myself that includes people I don’t already follow that are interacting a lot with the people I do. In other words, people I dig are talking to these people but I’m not listening to them myself…maybe I should!
Ever wondered who has recently unfollowed you? I know it might be heartbreaking from time to time, but maybe there’s a kind word you could throw their way to bring them back. Formulists has a preset just for that! They have another one that will auto-include the people you’ve been talking to the most…or your top retweeters.
So, question two, “Are they for me or my followers?” With Formulists, you can make lists that help you and others that reward your followers.
Everyone likes to be included, right?
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Have you used Paper.li at all? You can connect it to a list and it will pull any content that list shared through Twitter links into a “newspaper.” Some people use it instead of a feed reader.
True! You can also use HootSuite to search for keywords within a list. Having this one part of the puzzle be auto-generated and maintained has so many other repercussions down the way when you add list-friendly services. Flipboard anyone?
Thanks for the review of Formulist. It’s a great service. Do you know if there’s a tool that gets you added to people’s Twitter list? I’m researching a blog post and I want to make sure there’s no such tool :)
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