Making My Lists and Remaking Them Twice

This post is by Kat Caverly. In 2005 photographer/graphic designer Kat Caverly founded NoEvil Productions with her husband Thomas Hudson Reeve, a filmmaker. Together they have created over 1000 ecard designs, also producing the voice, sound effects and music. In 2009 Kat proudly gave birth to Greetums.com, her very first own greeting card company.

A few days ago, I wrote a post called The Case Against Twitter Lists and Facebook Filters. A few people agreed with me, but several other people said, “Are you crazy? I use lists all of the time!” One of those people was Ms. Caverly. So I asked her to write up why she likes lists for engagement. Here is what she wrote!

I came to Twitter to meet and greet people. Striking up conversations and engaging strangers is one of the things I did best when I was photographing people on the streets of Manhattan, and this skill translated quite well online, particularly on Twitter.

But my main timeline became a nightmare when I reached over 300 accounts I was following. By the time I surpassed 500 I was no longer able to keep track of anyone in particular. Fortunately I hit this milestone around the same time as the introduction of Twitter Lists.

I had already started to use TweetDeck, one of the most popular 3rd party apps for tweeting and I soon learned that I could use it to display List columns, as well as mentions and direct messages. But it took me a few months to grasp a subtler tool —private versus public lists.

At first I just created public lists, which ended up being a kind of community acknowledgment; a bit of social currency. I wanted to be able to pay special attention to the deeper relationships that were being developed. I am honestly interested in what people are sharing.

I started to look for new interesting people via the lists that I was being added to until a new service launched—Formulists. On the surface this seemed to be a wonderful tool. I in fact still use it but only for private lists. I believe that anything important should be manually updated and maintained. And relationships with people are important, however casual or lightweight.

I use private lists to help me organize and analyze new followers. I use public lists to help me socialize with the people whose tweets I follow or have followed in the past. I took many months to get my set of lists just right so that I get the information I want easily and quickly. Next? #Hashtag chats to meet like-minded as well as different minded people active on Twitter!

This is post #23 in The Engagement Series! If you are worried about missing a post, hit that good ole “subscribe” button!

Photo Credit: Illumination, photo Thomas Hudson Reeve, model: Kat Caverly