How To Use Twitter Lists in Hootsuite

About a month ago, we talked about why you should care about Twitter lists and talked about a few examples of using lists to catch breaking news. It’s all well and good to talk about lists and how great they are, but yet another to actually go about implementing them. In this post, we’ll take you step-by-step and show you exactly how to use lists in Hootsuite.

Creating a List

To create a list, you’ll need to add a column for it. If you’ve already created a list elsewhere, you would follow this same procedure to track that list in Hootsuite. Simple click Add Column button on the top-right near the search box. In the dialog that pops up, choose Twitter List. From here, you can create a new list to monitor, choose one of the lists you’ve previously created, and also pick from lists you’ve subscribed to (created by others).

Editing a List

Once you’ve got your shiny new column created for your list, you can edit the list by clicking the pencil icon on the top right corner. This simple dialog lets you add and remove people from the list. This is the only way to remove someone from a list and you obviously can’t edit a list you didn’t create. This also assumes that you know the names of people you want to add, which can be inconvenient.

List Sniping

Of course, the simple alternative is to add user’s to lists on-the-fly, something I’ve talked about before. As you watch people flow through your Home Feed or other lists/groups you follow, you can click their name to add them to a list. This way, you can filter people in realtime based on the context of their tweets. One limitation here is that you won’t be able to add them to a list you haven’t created a column for.

Combined with Hootsuite’s other advanced features, lists become a powerful tool in helping you not only keep track of the people you follow, but also in discovering new lists and people to track. More specifically:

• Control how many columns are displayed on the screen at a time using the slider on your top right.
• Use drag and drop to further control what is visible at any given time.
• Add additional tabs to give yourself more room to work with.

Still have questions? Leave them in the comments.