Why would you want to make a list on Twitter? If you have less than 50 people that you follow, you probably don’t. If you have upwards of 100 or more, you have to sort out the noise. Some people tweet endlessly. Some people tweet when they have something important to say or share. Making a list on Twitter can help you filter out the babble from the good stuff. Here’s how to do it.

Click on your profile then click on the ‘Lists’ tab. Click on ‘Create a list’ . The menu that comes up looks like this:

This menu asks for a name and a description. I’ve divided my lists into about 11 groups. Since I have a rather eclectic set of interests, five or six lists wouldn’t work. Some people are nice but just tweet too damn much. I have to keep my main crew in one list that I follow all the time. The rest are ones that I check on now and then. If someone adds me on Twitter, I feel that it’s a compliment for some reason. Usually I follow them back. If they tweet too much, they go on my ‘Dunno’ list and I forget about them.

Once you have a few lists set up, go back to the main Twitter timeline and then click on the Following link on the right side of the window. Wait for the full list to load. If you’ve got a few hundred people that you follow then this could take a while. Once you’re there, you’ll see something like this:

See the ‘Add to list’ link? Click on it and a your set of lists will pop up. This is what you’ll see:

As you can see, I’ve got Jesus on my Comedy list. Follow ‘Him’ and you’ll see why. Once you choose which list you want the person or company to be on, click anywhere out of the box and it will disappear. If you’ve got a huge number of people that you follow, do a few at a time and keep track of where you start and end. Also, make sure that you put each new person that you follow on some kind of list. That will save you work later on.

Once you have all of your ‘followees’ sorted, go back to the main timeline, click on ‘Lists’ again and you’ll see a menu of all of your lists pop down. Choose which one you want to take a look at and click it. All of the tweets from those people will become your timeline. Once you’re read all of the tweets that interest you, move to another list. Some of my people are on two lists and you may find that this is something you might want to do.

I hope this helps you keep your Twitter account simpler and more fun. The site can be a terrific source of information. It’s up to you to sort it out. This is how I did it.

Thanks for reading!