I love the variety and serendipity of Twitter’s timeline. Whenever I check my timeline, I see the news, commentary, humor and complaints of the moment from the nearly 2,500 people that I follow.
But the variety and serendipity that I love can quickly become the chaos that makes Twitter confusing and time-consuming — and thus useless — to a busy beat reporter.
Reporters, even if they enjoy the free flow of the timeline, should use Twitter lists, saved searches, alerts and/or columns in a service such as TweetDeck or HootSuite so they can more efficiently and more reliably find the tweets that are most useful to them.
One more important way to organize Twitter is to check your “mentions” regularly. On Twitter.com, click “connect” at the top of the page, and it will let you see only tweets that mention you (or you can click the tab to see all your interactions – retweets, new followers and people who have favorited your tweets, in addition to mentions). This helps you see quickly when people are replying to your tweets or otherwise mentioning you.
If you’re using TweetDeck or HootSuite, you will have one column for your mentions. On mobile apps, mentions are usually a tab at the bottom (probably using the @ sign).
Making a Twitter list is easy. I know of at least three ways to get to the “create list” option (and I might not know them all):
- At the Twitter.com home page, click the bust silhouette at the upper right to open the pull-down menu and choose “Lists.”
- From the Twitter.com home page, click on your profile (your name, right under “Home.”) Then click on “lists” in the left-hand column, right under “favorites.” In the upper right, you will see a “create list” button.
- In a tweet from someone you want to save to a list, click the username. That will open a small window with the user’s profile and most recent tweets. Right next to the “follow” or “following” box is a silhouette of a human bust, with a pull-down-menu arrow next to it. Click the arrow and one of your choices will be “add or remove from lists.” Click that and one of your choices will be to create a list. (If you want to add this person to an existing list, the menu also has all your lists, so you just select the one you want.)
Either way, once you click the “create list” button, it’s pretty self-explanatory: You name your list, choose whether it’s public or private and start selecting members.
Let’s say that you’re an education reporter covering a large urban school district and several smaller suburban districts. You might organize the people you follow on Twitter into the following lists:
- Urban School District
- Suburban districts
- School board members
- Schools
- Administrators
- Teachers
- Parents
- Students
- Academics
- Legislators
You’ll want to experiment with how large each list should be. For instance, the urban school district list could include everyone who tweets at all about the school district, overlapping considerably with the lists of board members, schools, etc. Or you could make a narrower list that just includes the official district Twitter account, board members, key administrators and the top officials of the teachers’ union. If you include schools’ Twitter accounts in the district list, maybe you don’t need a separate list of the schools.
Decide how much duplication on lists helps: You may want the superintendent on both the district list and the administrators list, or you may just want her on one of them. Do you want the administrators list to include administrators from all your districts or just from the urban district (with the suburban administrators going in the suburbs list)?
However you slice it, each list becomes a place to check in quickly on the buzz in a different segment of your beat. You may go weeks or months without checking the legislators list, where you collect the legislative leaders, local legislators and members of the education committees in your state legislature. But when the education funding bill is in committee or being debated, you may check that list daily to watch for developments that may affect local schools.
Lists are also helpful for collecting tweets that aren’t on your beat: fellow journalists (you may want a list of other education reporters), friends, personal interests such as sports, entertainment or humor, etc.
You also can save searches for quick checking either from Twitter.com or from TweetDeck, HootSuite or mobile apps. If you’re an environmental reporter, you might have saved searches for “fracking,” the acronym of the state environmental agency, the name of a local environmental group and the CEO of a local company involved in a controversy. You check those searches regularly to see if anyone is tweeting about those topics.
To save a search, just enter a term in the search window at the top of Twitter.com’s search page or on Twitter Advanced Search. In either case, your results page will have a gear icon in the upper right corner, with a pull-down-menu arrow next to it. “Save search” will be one of the choices in the pull-down menu. Then the saved search will show up whenever you click in the search window. It also will be in your profile on Twitter apps and you can make the saved search a column in TweetDeck or HootSuite.
Alerts are another way to organize the chaos of the web. Using a service such as TweetBeep, Tweetalarm or Twilert, you can set up alerts to come to your email every time a particular word or phrase is used in a tweet (or sometimes you can narrow the alert more). These work like Google alerts for Twitter.
What are some other tips for organizing the chaos of Twitter? Share them in the comments here or using #twutorial on Twitter.
Hashtags, such as #twutorial, are another way of organizing Twitter, and I’ll address them in the next post in this series, in another week or so.
About this series: This is the second post in a series on how to use Twitter as a reporter. In the first post, I discussed search techniques. Thanks to all who took the poll in last week’s blog post, helping me choose this topic for the next post (31 of you voted for it).
Tips from my tweeps about organizing Twitter
I asked my tweeps for advice on organizing Twitter:
@stevebuttry For the iPad/iPhone/android, I’ve found Flipboard is really good for managing/following lists and searches.
— Brian Moritz (@bpmoritz) July 14, 2012
@stevebuttry No problem! I like it because it keeps my searches out in front. I don’t have to search for my searches and lists.
— Brian Moritz (@bpmoritz) July 14, 2012
@stevebuttry It allows me to break things down by subject and be able to find the things I need easily.
— Jen Connic (@jenconnic) July 14, 2012
@stevebuttry For example, I have a list of emergency services, which allows me to check things like power outages, train delays, etc.
— Jen Connic (@jenconnic) July 14, 2012
@stevebuttry If @seesmic is on your list of tools, be aware there’s no more web version and the desktop version is awful. No good subs IMHO.
— Elaine Clisham (@eclisham) July 14, 2012
Resources for organizing Twitter
Mashable’s HOW TO: Use Twitter Lists by Jason Josh Catone
The Next Web’s How Twitter Lists Work
Smart Ways to Use Twitter Lists by Alexis Grant
Twitter’s How to Save Searches
Getting Started with TweetDeck
How to Use TweetDeck to Create Twitter Lists
How to Use HootSuite and Twitter Lists to Engage Your Audience
It’s Josh Catone from Mashable, Not Jason!
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Fixed it. Thanks, Stephanie!
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Coming to this a bit late, but wondering: do you put people on a list and then unfollow them to streamline your timeline, or do you put them on a list and keep them as a follower, too?
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You can do either. If you’re bumping up against the follower limit, unfollowing people you’ve added to lists is definitely a good idea.
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