Twitter Tips – 5 Types of People to Follow on Twitter and How To Organize Them

Twitter is a great way to network and connect with people online but it can get a bit overwhelming once you’re following more than a few people.

Here are two ways to make it easier:

• divide your connections into the five groups below
• create Twitter lists to sort their tweets

For Fun: Friends & Family

Connect with your friends and family for fun.  Do keep in mind that if you’re using Twitter for business, each tweet you send out will reflect on you and your business.

For Information: Broadcast Accounts

Some Twitter accounts don’t interact much with their followers and are setup primarily to broadcast information such as new blog posts, updates to a website, news articles, inspirational quotes, or other tidbits.  I follow a dozen or so local news sources to keep up with their breaking news tweets.

For Business Building Relationships: Target Market

Small business can use Twitter as a great way to get in touch with their target market and find potential clients and customers.  Use Twellow (the Twitter Yellow Pages) to find people by categories of interest.  Choose some to follow and many will follow you back.  When you watch this list, look for questions you can answer or resources you can share based on what they’re asking and looking for.

For Business Connection Opportunities: Colleagues

Twitter’s a great place to connect with your colleagues.  You can build your relationships with them by re-tweeting their tweets and watching for opportunities to be of help to them.

For Learning and Growth: Mentors

If you have newsletters or business blogs you regularly learn from, chances are good the authors are on Twitter.  Add them to a Mentor group where you can go for great business building advice and inspiration when you want it.

How to Create Lists

To organize those you follow into easy lists so you can view each group once at a time, make use of the Twitter feature called “Lists” by following these steps:

• Login to your Twitter account
• Go to your profile page
• On the right side, look for “Lists” and click the “New List” link
• Enter a list name, description and choose public (everyone can see/follow your list) or private (only you can see it)
• Click “Create List”
• Now your list will appear on the right side of your page
• Search for the people you’d like to add to your new list
• On the profile page of the person you’d like to add, on the same line as “Following” you’ll see a “Lists” button to click
• A drop down will appear where you can check a box to add the person to your list
• Repeat for anyone you’d like to add to the list

Once you’ve created your list, you can view a tweet stream that includes only the tweets of people in that specific list.