How I learned to see Twitter through the eyes of people I admire

I’ve been using Twitter for almost 8 years now, and I’m happy with the list of people that I follow. It’s always changing of course — the list grows as I discover new people through podcasts, retweets, and real life interactions and it shrinks when my interests change or I no longer find value in what someone is sharing. Overall, I’ve found that a following count in the 250–300 range is manageable for me.

Nobody’s Twitter experience is the same as mine. Everyone gets something different out of the service based on their own curation of the millions of accounts out there. I started wondering lately what it would be like to look at the tweets that are seen by some of the people I admire. Would it expose me to new ideas and information? It would have to. Perhaps it would also give me some insight into what makes those people worth looking up to in the first place.

Here’s how i did it:

Back in 2011, Twitter itself enabled a feature where you could click on someone’s “Following” list and get a view of what those people were tweeting. This was a cool feature that I remember using, but like many Twitter experiments it quietly disappeared. For a time, the now discontinued Tweetdeck iOS app even had a “User Timeline List” feature which let you create a private Twitter List filled with up to 500 accounts that a given user was following with the click of a button, but both the feature and the app itself are long gone. A private Twitter list filled with all the people your ‘target’ follows is what we’re going for here in order to quickly and easily switch between views, but as it turns out there isn’t an easy way to do it.

Creating a private Twitter list is easy (It’s best to make these lists private, so as not to look so creepy). It can be done from the web, Twitter’s official apps across all platforms, and from most third-party Twitter apps.

From twitter.com/lists just click on the “create new list” button, give your list a name (such as the name of the person you’re looking to emulate), add a description if you like, click on the “Private” radio button, and then click save list.

Here comes the hard part.

Twitter doesn’t offer any quick and easy way to add people to a list. From a user’s “Following” page, it takes 4 clicks (gear, “add or remove from lists…”, box beside list, and X to close) to add them to a list. Multiply this by the number of people your target is following (100? 300? 1000? more?) and it can get… cumbersome. I spent hours looking at different Twitter apps and social media management platforms to see if there was any way to quickly select every account that a random Twitter user is following and add them to a list. Guess how many I found that could do the job?

One.

TwiMana is a Japanese made iOS app that hasn’t had a significant update since October 2014. With TwiMana, you can search for a Twitter user, tap on their Follow list, tap a Select button in the upper right hand corner, and then individually tap on a radio button next to each user in the list before tapping the share sheet button which will allow you to perform a number of batch actions on those selected users — including adding them to one of your lists. The app itself is free, but only allows you to select 5 accounts at a time to perform a batch action on unless you unlock the full version with a $2 in-app purchase (highly recommended if you plan on doing this). It ain’t pretty, but it works. While I’m at it I go ahead and add the user themselves to the list — after all, their posts are a part of their Twitter experience too.

In the end I found that what I got out of this experiment was as varied as what you can get out of Twitter itself. Copy the followers of people too much like you and it’s like a non-perfected version of your own timeline. Copy someone with drastically different interests than you and none of what you see is terribly compelling. When I picked just the right account to mimic though, it helped me discover a number of new and interesting people and opinions, which is one of the main reasons I started using Twitter in the first place.