Twitter Adds List Search Capacity on Desktop

Here’s a small, but potentially helpful Twitter update. Starting today, when you go to the ‘Lists’ tab in the web version of the app, you can now search for interesting lists based on your focus keywords.

So if you’re especially interested in a particular topic, you can now find Twitter lists to join, which could help you find more users to follow, or add more nuance to your Twitter experience.

You can scan through Twitter lists by using the Lists tab (mobile or web), while also pinning lists as swipeable feeds in the main Twitter UI, so you can easily flip over to topical areas of interest. Of course, List tweets aren’t necessarily topic specific. It’ll include all of the tweets from people who commonly tweet about the chosen topic. But they’re more niche-defined than the general Twitter experience.

Just like with bookmarks, subscriptions, and Community Notes, Twitter 2.0 has tried to highlight Lists as a key functional element, and an undiscovered gem which hadn’t been adequately highlighted by previous Twitter management. Which, to some degree, might be true, but for most users, they are aware of these functions, they just haven’t found them that useful or interesting.

The Twitter team is now trying to streamline and improve the functionality of each, as a quick way to improve engagement, though we don’t have any stats, as yet, in regards to whether the usage of these elements has increased as a result of Twitter’s recent UI updates.

But List search could be a helpful consideration, especially if you’re looking for key influencers and conversations in your business niche. Now, you can search for lists based on your brand keywords, and monitor these lists for relevant mentions. You can even add them as separate columns in TweetDeck, and set up alerts for specific keyword mentions by List members, which could help you hone in on potential opportunities, by finding the right users to follow, and tweets to action.

I’m not sure that Lists have as much functional value as the new Twitter team may suggest, but there are some good ways to use them, which could help in your research and monitoring efforts.