Tool for journalists: Tweetbe.at for managing Twitter lists

What is it: a website that lets you manage your Twitter lists and create new ones based on filtered searches

How is it of use to journalists: Twitter lists are a great way of sorting through a busy timeline and organising Twitter accounts, that you may not necessarily want to follow, based on users' expertise or location.

Having access to well-curated Twitter lists in a breaking news situation means you can quickly monitor the latest developments, and find eye witnesses who might be posting images or videos from the scene.

But curating lists can be a long process, as Twitter requires you to manually add each user to your preferred list.

With Tweetbe.at you can add and remove users in bulk from your existing Twitter lists, and also create new ones by finding people through filtered searches.

Some of Tweetbe.at's useful filters are location based searches, looking at the number of days since a tweet was posted from an account, or setting preferences based on which users and lists are being followed by the users.

You can also combine filters to create a more specific search, and once you are happy with your results, you can add the accounts to existing or newly-created Twitter lists.

This can be done either by ticking the accounts you want and only adding them, or by selecting all of the users returned by your search and adding them to a list with a few clicks.

Here's an example search finding users tweeting in London, who have more than 500 followers and who have been active in the last two days.



There are two options for searching based on location. You could use the "tweeting near" feature as your primary filter for a search, which works based on postcodes (write them as EC1XYZ rather than EC1 XYZ). Alternatively you can use location as an additional filter, which works best if you type in the place name.

Here is an example search looking at London based Twitter users who are writing about Prime Minister's Questions using the hashtag #pmqs.



Results are displayed in chronological order with the most recent at the top – click on 'older' to see more.

You can also use Tweetbe.at to manage your Twitter account and unfollow inactive users for example, or search through your lists by applying the same filters as you would during a general Twitter search.

All the features included above can be used for free, and Tweetbe.at has a Pro version priced at $4.95 a month that enables you to switch between different Twitter accounts with more ease.

If you're just looking for a quick way to add and remove users from lists, you could also try Tweez.it.

It lets you create new lists, search for users based on their name or Twitter handle, and then add them to your lists – you can also remove multiple accounts from lists in one go.

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