Staying organized from the get-go will make your life a lot easier down the road. Case in point (or a cautionary tale, rather): When tax season came around this year, I realized that my imprudent negligence of bookkeeping during the past year really kicked my behind. I got a similar feeling when I took over a client’s Twitter account, and stared at their thousands of uncategorized and unlisted followers. There was no organization whatsoever, just a big, ugly lump of followers.
The problem is that a lot of people neglect to create lists and organize their followers in the beginning. As time goes on, and as their follower base grows, categorizing their followers into specific lists becomes too tedious and too time consuming.
Why organize your followers into lists? Lists make it easier for you to keep track of who you’re following, and whom you’ll want to interact with. By categorizing your followers into themed lists (by industry, location, interests, etc.), you can easily search for specific users by these criteria later when you want to further connect with them. Also, since Twitter updates in real-time, you are bound to miss a lot of quality tweets during the day. Making lists allows you to go back during any time and read tweets from only people in that designated list, so you don’t have to worry about missing out on what your favorite people are saying throughout the day. Pretty cool, huh?
Moral of the story? Start organizing your Twitter followers from the beginning, or before you accrue too many and then the task becomes way too daunting. Do it, or else the IRS will come after you.
