Twitter Tip #1 for Beginners: Follow Lists Before You Follow People!

By Neal Schaffer

This is a continuation of my previous post, where I wrote about 7 useful tips for those getting started on Twitter.  Assuming that you have just signed up on Twitter and don’t know where to go from here, instead of following everyone from your email address book that is already on Twitter by selecting “Find People” from the top of Twitter, begin your Twitter experience by following Lists before you follow People.  The rationale is simple: Twitter gets a bad rap because of the “babble” that a lot of people are said to be tweeting.  That is why you should start your Twitter experience by just following user-vetted Twitter Lists and then finding your role models to follow that will fill your timeline with relevant content.  How to go about doing this?

First of all, for a primer on what a Twitter List actually is, please refer to my previous blog post on 4 Great Ways to Use the New Twitter Lists.  In essence, Twitter Lists are lists of twitter users selected and categorized by Twitter users like you and me.  Because every Twitter List is hand-picked, they offer a glimpse as to who in Twitter has expertise on various subjects.  They are a perfect guide as to who we should follow on Twitter.

1.) Align Your Twitter Objective with Keywords

Right now your Twitter timeline should be blank.  Instead of filling it with irrelevant messages that may lessen the value of Twitter for you, remember why you are on Twitter in the first place.  Searching for a job?  Marketing your business? Interested in meeting local people? Want to develop your personal brand and show off your subject matter expertise?  Regardless of your objective, you should be able to align it with a keyword.  For searching for a job that keyword might be “job seeker” or “careers.”  Marketing would be “marketing” or perhaps an industry name.  Location would be your local city or county.  Personal branding itself is a keyword.  By doing this it will make it easier for you to…

2) Find Relevant Twitter Lists to Follow

In a recent post on how to find relevant new people to follow on Twitter, I mentioned Listorious as the best way to find relevant Twitter Lists to follow.  Once you navigate over to the site, enter the keyword in the search box at the top right-hand corner of the screen and voila!  A list of Twitter Lists will follow.  If you chose a tag which is popular, not only will all of the Twitter Lists appear in descending order by the number of people following the list, the top “curators” who appear on the most Twitter Lists associated with that tag will appear in descending order on the number of lists that they are listed on.  This gives you a veritable plethora of information on a variety of Twitter Lists which you can now start to follow.  Follow one, follow a few, follow as many as you like: once you follow them, you can now switch between them from the “Lists” that will now appear on the right-hand side of your Twitter.com page.  If you couldn’t find any relevant tags for your keyword, selecting the most relevant of the top tags that appear on Listorious will hopefully help guide you to Twitter Lists of interest.

3) Monitor Your Twitter Lists for Relevant People to Follow

You don’t need to spend your entire day on Twitter.  Spend some time in the morning and maybe late afternoon and navigate between a few of your Twitter lists.  Look for information that you find relevant, and look who those people tweeting the information are.  After doing this for several days, you will start to find that some people are tweeting more relevant information than others, and you will quickly find your role models.  If you find someone tweeting out relevant information most of the time, go ahead and follow them.  By hand-picking people to follow from your relevant Twitter Lists, you will be filling up your Twitter timeline with your own virtual and ideal Twitter List.  More importantly, you will see first-hand that Twitter has become an amazing resource for information as well as an invaluable tool to help expand your network and communicate with other people in your field of interest.

Twitter Lists have all been user-vetted, so off the bat you can expect to find people that are less babble and more content.  By doing so, you will get up-to-speed on Twitter very quickly and should soon have your “a-ha!” moment which will leave your doubts about Twitter in the dust.  Give it a try and tell me what you think!  And keep coming back for more Twitter Tips for Beginners…

Image by Jrod2.

Related articles by Zemanta

• 10 Stupid Twitter Mistakes to Avoid. What other big Twitter mistakes can you think of (mybyte.co.za)
• Integrating Twitter lists into your ORM process (socialmedia.biz)
• Twitter lists: Public or private? (technology.johnsamuel.in)
• Track Twitter Lists with Listiti Alerts (bloggingot.com)