Are You Making The Twitter Lists?
If you’re working with social media, you’re probably on Twitter, which means you’ve been hearing a lot about Lists.
This new feature helps you place the people you follow — or not — into groups, just as you may do with TweetDeck (which has announced it will integrate with Lists). The big difference: you can make Twitter Lists public on your profile, where anyone may peruse and follow them.
So what do technology marketers need to do with Twitter Lists? Not much for now.
Lists are great for people whose business is solely influence, like Robert Scoble. For the rest of us who build, sell and support goods and services, lists provide a little more organization, and complexity, to life on Twitter. Until the frenzy dies down, here are some suggestions:
- Organize the many people you follow: Lists are an easy way to keep track of tweeters who are most important to you. Create a list of your Top Customers, another for Top Bloggers in your market. Keep the lists private. Extreme transparency proponents may disagree, but why make it easy for your competitors to leverage your Twitter network?
- Research others’ lists: Look at the Twitter accounts of others: journalists, influencers, customers, shareholders and competitors. If you see a valuable list, check out the people on it or just follow it outright. Looks like someone’s done the footwork for you.
- Use lists as a gauge of influence. The number of lists a person appears on is becoming another indicator of influence.
Once, long ago (months and months, it seems) the number of followers was the measure of Twitter stature. Then the spammers made that number moot. The question today is “how many lists are you on?” Tomorrow it will be something else. So don’t get too worried about lists. And just keep in mind that the quality of a person’s content and interaction remains the most important attribute on Twitter.
Tags: high-tech marketing, social media, Twitter