Why Twitter lists are great for job seekers

Twitter’s new feature allows you to separate the people you follow into groups – or lists. If you’re new to Twitter, the stream of chatter, updates and links can easily become overwhelming. Lists make Twitter both more manageable and more useful to job seekers.

- Organisation
By creating and labelling your own lists, you can keep themed areas of interest together. You might have job boards in one list and careers coaches in another; or arrange lists by industry, such as IT consultants on one list, web developers on another, for example.

There’s a limit to how many lists you can create, and how many people you can put into each list, but the list names can be edited, and you can take people out of one list and put them in another through the “Manage lists” button.

- Time-saving
The more you follow, the more tweets you’ll be wading through, and the greater the chance that you’ll miss something useful. Keeping up-to-date with what people are saying becomes increasingly more time-consuming as you follow more people, but lists mean you can dip in and out to get nuggets of useful information without trawling back through pages and pages of tweets.

- Focussed networking
As I went through the names of people I follow, it made me rethink the reasons I followed thrm in the first place. Very often we follow those that follow us, in the spirit of reciprocity and etiquette, but we may never actually engage with that person – or even find their tweets entertaining or useful.

Lists are a good way to assign people into groups which you might only glance at occasionally, freeing you up to interact with people you have more in common with. It helps you achieve quality over quantity in your conversations.

- Professional reputation
Unless you have multiple Twitter accounts, the people you follow probably include friends, family and professional contacts. Twitter lists can be public or private, so you can keep your personal contacts in a locked list, visible only to you.

Your lists appear on your Twitter sidebar and can be followed by others, so enhance your professional reputation by following (and being followed by) industry leaders, while protecting the privacy of your personal contacts.

How else are Twitter lists useful?