Twitter recently introduced a new feature called lists to many users. This isn’t available to everyone – I’ve heard many reports of people who are unable to see anybodies lists. Basically, it allows you to organize the people you follow into several different categories. These can be made private and can be followed by others.
This is an awesome for those who are using the web interface as you can choose the groups you want to read at any time.
However, there are some considerations you need to make before embracing this feature.
1. People may be offended by not being included on a list.
Some of my friends created lists like ‘awesome friends’ and ‘top bloggers.’ They used these terms as generalist lists but some people took offense at not being included on a list.
This is very similar to the follow/unfollow situations that happened before people started to embrace groups on other clients.
So, what can you do to avoid offending?
• Have a disclaimer on your twitter landing page
• Make your list private
• Organize lists by geographic region – ie, Melbourne bloggers.
When you’re starting out with Twitter it is easy to make mistakes and put potential followers off-side. In this post Jenny Cromie (follow her at @JennyCromie) explores 8 ways to tick off other Twitter users.
Have you ever been to a social networking event and watched someone make a complete fool out of themselves? It’s like watching a car wreck in slow motion. Or like listening to a violinist who doesn’t know the difference between an A flat and and A sharp. It’s painful.
The whole point of a social networking event is to get to know people and build relationships. But if you don’t have a handle on the right social graces, you’ll make the wrong kind of lasting impression.
To the uninitiated, Twitter may seem like a collection of random conversations and annoying mini marketing campaigns. But the Twitterverse is really a big community that you build up around you. And as with most communities, there are certain rules—spoken and unspoken. There’s etiquette on Twitter—or as I like to call it—Twittiquette.
People new to the Twitterverse can’t help it if they make a few social gaffes now and then. Because they simply don’t know what they don’t know. In these cases, social missteps are forgivable. I made a few myself when I first joined up. One time, a new follower thought I was a bot. A bot I most certainly was not, I told her. I just couldn’t figure out the status updater I was using and ended up pinging my poor Tweeps with multiple announcements about my latest blog post (my belated apologies again, Tweeps).
But there are others who have been milling around the Twitterverse for a while and they clearly should know better. These are the folks who you would never ever in a million years want to run into at a chamber of commerce event. In person, they would probably corner you for a half hour or more and talk at you about how fantabulous their company/product/service is and why you should give a gosh darn.
And if you haven’t figured it out already, some of these folks are mingling about and icking up the Twitterverse too. You might even have a couple in your list of followers. Or <gasp> maybe you recognize yourself in one of Twitter types below.
In any case, here’s my list of the eight most difficult Twitter types. The kind of folks that you want to unfriend, unfollow, and unTwitter.
And hey—if the shoe fits, I trust that you’ll know what to do. Or if you are guilty of some of the below but simply are in denial, I hope for your sake that one of your Tweeps will be kind enough to pull you aside via Direct Message and tell you to knock it off already!
Image by 