A little while ago, I wrote about how much of a difference Tweetdeck has made to my use of Twitter. I was on the precipice of leaving Twitter altogether when I finally started using Tweetdeck.

One of my earliest attempts to contain the flood of tweets on my timeline was to create Lists. This seemed like an obvious solution to me…gather up Twitter accounts into groupings based on some common feature. It gets even better, because the accounts in a list don’t have to be among your followers. that way, you don’t see their tweets on your regular feed, just in the list. Cool, right?

For example, there are loads of accounts that tweet motivational quotes. They are good. Really good. Sometimes I need a shot of motivation, and it’s nice to see a quote along those lines. The two main problems I’ve had with the motivational quote accounts is that they tweet other stuff (much of it trash) and they tweet a lot. A lot, a lot…as Jim Carrey said in Dumb and Dumber. With the goal or reducing information overload, it really helps to sequester these accounts into a list and then unfollow (or mute) them. You still get the benefit of their content, but you get to consume it on your schedule.

To make this more practical so you can put it into use, think of a category of accounts that you’d like to lump together. I’m going to use Motivational Quotes as my example. I’m going to give you instructions to create and populate your list from the Tweetdeck interface, the process is similar enough in Twitter that I trust that you can figure it out on your own. If you can’t, leave a comment below and I’ll do what I can to help you figure it out!

So, you’ve got a column with your timeline flying by. Mine is titled Home @HecticDad01. Focus on this column and follow these instructions:

Creating a list and adding an account to it:

• Pick an account you want to put onto your list. I picked @Sports_HQ.
• Click on the ellipsis ( … ) on the bottom right part of the tweet’s box
  • You can do this right from the timeline, or you can click on the tweet to stop the incessant scrolling
• Click on Add or remove from lists…
  • As a smart-alecky aside, the Tweetdeck folks use more ellipses than I do. I strongly approve!
• Since you’ve never created a list, the box will be empty, but don’t worry
• Click on +Create new list
• Give the list a name, I chose Quotes Worth Reading
• If you feel like it, give the list a description
  • If the list is going to be public (more in a second), it’s a good idea to describe your list
• If you want other people to be able to see and/or follow your list leave it public, otherwise make it private by clicking on the appropriate radio button.
• Click the Save button
• A window will appear with the account you just added to the list on the right and suggestions on the left
  • If you want to add any of the suggested accounts, click on the plus sign ( ⊞ ) next to the account
  • The new account will appear in the list on the right
  • The plus sign will change to a checkmark ( ☑ )

That’s it, you just created a list. But a list with one account isn’t all that worthwhile. So scroll through that timeline and find another account that belongs on your newly minted list. Got one? Let’s go:

Adding an account to an existing list

• Pick an account you want to put onto your list. I picked @LegendSteveJobs.
• Click on the ellipsis ( … ) on the bottom right part of the tweet’s box
• Click on Add or remove from lists…
• A window will appear with all the lists that you’ve created
• Click on the box ( ◻ ) next to the list to add this account to the list
• The box will change to a checkmark ( ☑ )
• You can add the account to as many lists as you like

Keep adding to the list. Put some more accounts on there. There isn’t any magic number of accounts on a list, it’s totally up to you. You can create up to 1,000 lists, and each list can have 5,000 members. If you hit either of those numbers, you might have a Twitter problem. Or you’re using it in ways that I can’t quite foresee. Of course, this is coming from a guy with 1,100 total followers and slightly more that I’m following. If you’re account is massively huge I’m a bit envious at this point. I guess I can see my lists growing as I want to manage more (and I find more accounts to follow).

Now let’s assume that you’ve been adding accounts to your lists and you decide you want to drop somebody. How do you do that? It’s pretty much the opposite of adding an account to a list, but for completeness here are the instructions:

Removing an account from an existing list

• Pick an account you want to remove from a list
• Click on the ellipsis ( … ) on the bottom right part of the tweet’s box
• Click on Add or remove from lists…
• A window will appear with all the lists that you’ve created
• Click on the checkmark ( ☑ ) next to the list you want to remove the account from
• The checkmark will change to an empty box ( ◻ )
• You can remove the account from as many lists as you wish

Now that you’ve got the lists, and they’re in separate columns, you can see a digest of the accounts on the list in one place. It’s a pretty neat trick. If you decide to remove the columns that display the lists, they’re still there in the background, quietly collecting all the tweets. You can see the lists through the regular Twitter interface or you can click on the plus sign in the left column of Tweetdeck, select lists, pick a list, and review it or add it as a column.

The folks over at Buffer came up with and excellent post called 23 Seldom-Used Ideas for How to Use Twitter Lists. There are some really great ideas for different lists that you might want to create. Of course, I discovered this after I’d done all the legwork of creating the step-by-step instructions above…only to find that they have basically the same information at the bottom of their post. And you get fancy screen shots and pictures to boot.

Conclusion

So there you have it. I find my Twitter lists to be essential to my everyday workflow. They also keep my head from exploding due to the number of tweets that I’d like to read compared to the number of tweets that are out there. Eventually I’ll get around to writing more posts about how I use Tweetdeck, including such things as filtering, tracking followers, scheduling tweets, interacting with direct messages, using collections, and using searches (including hashtags). While I’m not a bonified power user, I do make use of many of the capabilities of Tweetdeck to get things done.

If you’re interested, go to Tweetdeck and get started. It’s part of the Twitter suite of tools and it’s free!