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5 Reasons to use Twitter Lists

Okay, so if you’re already saying “What’s a Twitter List?” click here for more information from Twitter itself (why reinvent the wheel eh) for a good introduction to lists.

Less than 10% of tweeters use twitter lists but it is such a useful tool and allow you to use twitter more efficiently. I get asked about them a lot so I thought I’d post 5 (of many) reasons why you should be really using them:

1. Finding relevant/new followers – when you find an interesting person to follow, click into their profile and have a look down the right-hand side until you get to the ‘lists’ section – if they have any publicly viewable lists (all lists can be private or public – but that’s a whole different blog post!) you will see them here – say you are a Shropshire business looking to connect with other local businesses and they have a list called ‘Shropshire’, they have just saved you a lot of searching time – just click into the list and start following those that appeal to you.
2. Filtering those you follow – everyone has a different approaches to who they follow/follow back on Twitter – some people will only follow back people they know, some will follow everyone that follows them and most people are somewhere in-between (personally I follow anyone locally and then further afield I only follow industry leaders/those I have engaged with or am interested in). As a result I follow over 900 people, so you can imagine the speed at which my twitter feed moves – sometimes I might just want to see what local tweeters are saying, or social media tweeters. I can do this by clicking on the lists I have set up and I just see tweets from those list members (within applications such as tweetdeck.com this can be set up as a separate column for each list) – a very useful filtering tool.
3. Categorisation – sometimes I get asked for relevant tweeters in a certain field or I need to find someone in particular – if I didn’t keep my followers/those I follow in lists I’d never be able to remember everyone, it would be very inefficient and involve a lot of searching around.
4. Competitor analysis - want to see who your competitors are following/who is following them? Again, go and have a look at their profile and see what lists they have, easy.
5. Group promotion – something I’m going to start using soon is putting all the attendees of Shropshire Jelly into a list called something obvious like ‘ShropshireJellyAttendees’ so that anyone new to Shropshire Jelly can get connecting with attendees before coming along to their first event, hopefully making it even more accessible and friendly thank it already is. You could do the same for attendees at any event you are running, members of a networking group, etc – the possibilities are endless!

If you so wish, follow @listwatcher on Twitter, it will DM you every time someone adds you or removes you from a list they have created – this can be very helpful again as it shows you possibly other similar tweeters who you may want to follow too.

These are just 5 reasons why you should use twitter lists – if you use lists for other reasons please add a comment below, lets share the knowledge!

TTFN

Jan

p.s. In case you’re wondering why you can’t see any lists on my profile, when I set them up I set them up as private lists, so it’s on my to do list to make them public! At least it proves private lists are indeed private

Tags: lists, Social Media, twitter, twitter followers