If you use twitter, you may find that you quickly become overwhelmed by the number of people following you. Now here’s the problem — you need to follow people to build followers, but if someone follows you and you don’t follow back, they may stop following you. There’s a “politeness” in the twitterverse that comes from returning follows and only the most popular of twitter folks can get away with having a huge number of followers and few they follow back. Ultra-popular author Neil Gaiman is one of those who has thousands of followers even though he only follows back a select few. Now, Neil does make it a habit to respond to @ messages (messages send directly to him). But most of us need to follow back most of our followers. And soon our list of friends grows well beyond what we can manage to keep track of.
This is where lists come in. Twitter lets you organize friends into groups or lists. You can then check in with your lists on a regular schedule to see what everyone is up to. And you can keep your closest or most important followers all in a single list that you might use instead of viewing your regular timeline. I use hootesuite for this. I have a list for writers, authors, editors and agents that I regularly interact with. I named the list “writers” and keep in up throughout the day rather than my full feed which has far too many followers to keep up with. I also use hootsuite to create lists for hashtags that I interact with, like the #amwriting or #amediting tags.