March 25, 2015 | less than a minute read

Twitter Lists Reduce Twitter Noise

Passle

Another great blog post by Violeta Nedkova, giving away Twitter's best kept secret: twitter lists are the best!

When you're a Twitter newbie, the amount of noise on your stream can be a bit overwhelming. Twitter lists are the easiest way for you to take control of it.

Lists can be private or public, which gives you some flexibility (especially if you want a list to keep track of your competitors!)

On my personal account, for instance, I have a private 'friends' list, so that I can keep track everyday of what they are posting.

On the Passle twitter account meanwhile, I have started growing a list of legal thought leaders, so that I can keep track of the latest legal news.

It's part of my marketing strategy to keep building on these lists because, as Violeta says, it's both a great way of controlling the noise, and also a way of getting yourself noticed without being overly spammy. What's not to love?

Without twitter lists I would not be able to follow anything on twitter. The moment you start following more than 2000 accounts, twitter starts getting noisy and overbearing. This is because there are no “groups” and the closest thing you have is channels (like #startups), which are always spammy because they’re dominated by the same brands and people. I disagree with Gary Vaynerchuk that twitter has a “noise problem”. No offence, Gary, but the problem is not the noise. The problem is that twitter doesn’t make its users aware of the only feature that helps silence it. If twitter promoted its lists more, people would not end up inundated and annoyed, and they would not give up on the platform because they’d be efficiently controlling the flood of information coming their way.