Follow more than five people on Twitter and you’ll quickly recognized that Twitter’s signal-to-noise ratio can make it difficult to find anything of value. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Twitter Lists to the game. Lists are a highly useful way to group users into relevant categories. Lists can be public (everyone can see them) or private (only you can see them), you can follow and unfollow lists just like you were following individual users, and you don’t have to be following someone to include them in a list. Join guest author Rob Laughter as he outlines important strategies for harnessing the power of Twitter Lists to reduce noise and focus on relevant information to help you stay ahead of the competition.
Cleaning Up Twitter Noise
There are two ways that we can use Lists to cut through the noise on Twitter and to tune in to the content that is most relevant to us.
First, we can group users by the topics or categories that they tweet about most often. For example, I could create a list for users who create content about social media. This list might include @twitfools @unmarketing and @mashable .
Second, we can group users based on physical proximity. Narrowing down that “Social Media” list, we could look only at users in the Raleigh, NC area. This list could include @waynesutton and @martinbrossman .
Lastly, we can group users based upon our relationships with those people. For instance, we could create one list for business connections, one for friends, and one for family. This way, we can quickly and easily find content from users that is relevant to us at different times during the day.
Public vs. Private Twitter Lists
So the not-so-obvious question is, “Why would we want to create private lists?” If we do so, no one can follow them except for us!
Therein lies the answer. If you’re a business on Twitter, you can harness the power of private Lists for competitive intelligence. Remember, we don’t need to follow people from our accounts to add them to a list on Twitter and if we add a user to a private list, they won’t see that information in the “Listed” link. Interested in staying a step ahead of the competition? Keep an eye on their Twitter stream and you might learn their next move.
On top of that, we may have a great friend who we’d like to follow, but that person might post a lot of garbage on Twitter. Leaving them off of a public list could cause some tension, but with private lists, there’s no harm and no foul.
Private Twitter lists can also be used for man crushes. Just saying…
Add Twitter Lists to Your Daily Routine
When any new feature appears on a social network, its success depends on the likelihood of its users to use it regularly. As you interact with your lists, you will learn how to add them to your daily routine. While categorizing all of the people you follow may seem like a daunting task, you can get into the habit of categorizing all NEW users you follow to your lists. A little preventative maintenance goes a long way to achieving long-term success.
That, friends, is “Lists in a Nutshell.” How have you been using lists? Weigh in in the comments.
Meet the author:
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ROB LAUGHTER is a social media coach and trainer from Raleigh, NC. Rob is a co-trainer in The Social Media Mastery Course, a 10-week intensive course in using social media tools for business, specializing in developing a winning content strategy and measuring the results. You can find out more by visiting www.connectiveinsights.com or following him on Twitter @RobLaughter |
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