Listorious: The Preferred Method for Finding Relevant Twitter Lists and Users

One of the questions I get asked by relative newbies to Twitter is how to go about finding relevant people to follow.  The problem that a lot of Twitter newbies have is that they either 1) upload their entire email address book and follow everyone and/or 2) they start following some of Twitter’s Suggested Users.  This has the tendency to fill the Timeline that one sees with LOTS of Tweets that may be irrelevant, or finding yourself following a few hundred people that may not be active Tweeters.  Right off the bat your Follower/Following Ratio is horrible, the inactive Twitter “friends” you follow probably arent’ following you back, and you have a Timeline of Tweets that are just overwhelming.  Help!  How do we rectify this situation?  Start your Twitter experience by first following relevant people to whatever your Twitter Objective may be.  Let’s look at the options we have of finding relevant people to follow: (and it is worth noting that Twitter even realizes this situation and is considering dropping their Suggested User List all together)

1. Twitter User Directories

As you will find during your Twitter journey, there are several third-party services out there that allow you to compliment your time on www.twitter.com, starting with famous Twitter applications like TweetDeck or HootSuite (note: more to follow but LinkedIn just announced their new “Tweets” application which will bring Twitter functionality to your LinkedIn Homepage).  There are also a number of Twitter User Directories, where user profiles are scanned and added or you can manually add yourself.  The most famous of these sites is Twellow, and if you haven’t registered or look for relevant people there yet, you definitely should.

2. TweetDeck Directory

The popular 3rd Party Twitter Client Application TweetDeck released their own version of Twitter’s suggested users just two months ago, grouping tweeters into industries such as “News & Politics”, “Business”, “Technology”, or “Entertainment” with further sub-categories within each parent category.  At the time this was a significant improvement from the Twitter Suggested Users, but I found a lot of quality Twitter Users were not included on the list.  Which raises the question of how TweetDeck actually selected users for their directory.  Considering that this is Social Media, I was never comfortable with one “authority” telling us which Twitter Users to include (and thus who to exclude) when looking for subject matter experts in certain industries.

3. Twitter Lists

Enter the emergence of Twitter Lists, which just appeared on Twitter a few weeks ago but are already fundamentally changing the way in which we interact with the social networking site.  Twitter Lists are how we can arrange the Tweets that we see on our Timeline by grouping people together, much like creating a Group in TweetDeck, which was the preferred way of doing this until now.  But by classifying Twitter users, we are seeing the beginnings of a truly democratic way of finding relevant people to follow: Twitter Users themselves defining who are the people we should be following by creating Lists.  We can now view the Twitter Lists that we appear on and get an idea of like-minded people who we have been classified together with that we may want to follow.

4. Listorious

Listorious is Twitter User Lists on steroids.  Just as you can enter your own profile information and add tags on Twellow, you can do the same thing for your Twitter Lists on Listorious.  Rather than digging through all of the User Lists in which you are listed, just go to Listorious and enter a tag or keyword that you are interested in.  Voila!  You can now see the top User Lists for that tag in descending numbers by the number of Twitter users following those lists.  In other words, these are lists that have been both vetted by real Twitter Users and now are sorted in popularity by these same real Twitter Users.  There are TONS of tags that are registered, and Listorious has added information for the Top 140 User Lists as well as the Top 140 People Listed on User Lists.  You can spend a long time looking at the data here and find lots of truly relevant people to follow.

Listorious is the ultimate child of the User Generated Content world of Social Media and is a true symbol of the democratization of information that Twitter User Lists has enabled.  And to think that it launched just two weeks ago!  We have come a long way in a very little time thanks to Twitter Lists and the Twitter Lists API!

By the way, I cannot complete this blog post without thanking the person who introduced me to Listorious, a good friend and Windmill Networker Phil Lauterjung.  Phil is on my Blogroll, so you should check out his blog as well, but he introduced it to me in the comments of my previous blog post on 4 Great Ways to Use the New Twitter Lists.  Thank you Phil!  And it just goes to show how much 1) commenting adds to the value of blog posts, and 2) what you could miss out if you don’t read all of the comments attached to a blog post!

What are your experiences in finding new Twitter Users to follow?  Have you been using Listorious?  Please share your experiences!

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