Your Guide to Sarasota on Twitter

In our always important mission to make life ridicuously easy, we found that Twitter in Sarasota could use a hand.

We've organized several Twitter lists on our @SarasotaPatch account that puts as many users in Sarasota that we could find into categories. Want to follow all the businesses? We got that. Nonprofits, government agencies and the lists go on, as you can see below.

Subscribe to these lists and tell your followers, too. And if you see that we're missing an account that should be listed, please tell us!

While we're at it, we noticed that people use two hashtags around here to localize the conversation: #Sarasota and #SRQ. Use your favorite one to help people find what's going on in Sarasota. Or use both! We prefer #SRQ for its brevity thanks to that 140 character limit but Sarasota seems to have more variety in the tweets.

Those hashtags and lists are easy to add if you use a service like TweetDeck. Click the plus button above the status bar to add a new column, and from there you can search for the hashtags or add the lists you subscribed to.

Sarasota, if Twitter can be ridiculous easy, then we all can have ridiculous and not so ridiculous conversations with each other and help get the conversation going.

Here are our lists:

• http://twitter.com/SarasotaPatch/SarasotaArts — Arts and Entertainment in Sarasota

• http://twitter.com/SarasotaPatch/SarasotaBiz — All businesses

• http://twitter.com/SarasotaPatch/SarasotaBlogs — Blogs and bloggers that cover or are based in Sarasota

• http://twitter.com/#!/SarasotaPatch/SRQcelebs — Celebrities and pro athletes who were born, grew up or live — seasonally or year-round — in greater Sarasota.

• http://twitter.com/SarasotaPatch/SRQeats — restuarants, bars and diners 

• http://twitter.com/SarasotaPatch/SRQeducation — Public, private schools and colleges 

• http://twitter.com/SarasotaPatch/SarasotaGovernment — Local, state and federal agencies as well as politicians who represent Sarasota at various levels

• http://twitter.com/SarasotaPatch/SRQmedia — media that covers Sarasota (includes TV stations from Tampa Bay)

• http://twitter.com/SarasotaPatch/SRQnonprofits — Nonprofit agencies and organizations that serve Sarasota

Oh and follow us on Twitter!