Twitter Lists: Like ’em or Love ’em?

mebiz, tech, & social media

Twitter Lists allow you to manage your experience and time on Twitter. I could not live without Twitter Lists since their arrival! I used to make lists on paper, then I created an Excel spreadsheet for my home-made Twitter Lists. I literally jumped with joy when Twitter created this enhancement for us!

Whether you are connected with 100 people, 1000 people, or 10,000 people on Twitter - Twitter Lists can help you organize and manage your Twitter experience. You get to create up to 20 lists with up to 500 people on each list. You are able to group people together by similar interests or purposes. You can make these lists either Public for everyone to see or Private that only you can see. Here are some suggested ideas of what type of lists you could create.

Connecting to Like-Minded Individuals

I wanted to get back into running for exercise in 2009 so I created a twitter hashtag #momsrunning to use every time I ran and invited other moms who ran to use it also. Now, we use that hashtag to communicate with each other about our runs, our struggles, our questions, or frustrations, and to share tips. Shortly, after this hashtag took off, I created a list of everyone that used that hashtag so we could all follow each other outside of our running endeavors.

Clients

I have a private client list on my account. I make sure that I am on top of what is going on with my clients and connecting with them on a daily basis. “Business is about building relationships, Make building them your business!” ~Scott Stratten @unmarketing.

#FollowFriday (#FF) this Week

I have great conversations everyday and come Friday I want to highlight a few people I connected with and used to write down these twitter handles in my planner for Fridays. Now, throughout the week, I just pop a person of interest into my Twitter List called “Follow Friday THIS week”. Then come Friday, I have a list all ready to go of who I would like to feature and introduce to my Twitter community. Once I have featured that person on a Friday, I remove them from the list.

Target Markets

I suggest that businesses create lists of their specific target markets as to easily observe, communicate, and get engaged with various groups. So, if your target market is something like: mommy bloggers, eco green moms, breastfeeding moms, cloth diapering moms, Michigan moms -then create a list for each of your main target markets.

People You Know in Real Life or Local Peeps

My first twitter list was of my friends that I knew in real life. I kept getting them lost in all of my followers and wanted to click on one place to connect with my friends fast vs. trying to remember all of their individual handles and typing those in. When I moved to a new community where I did not know very many people , I created  a Local List. So, whenever I found someone on Twitter from my new town, I popped them into a list named after the city in which I live. I started building on these connections online and now have met many of these people in person!

Look, Listen and be a Voyeur

I have a list of people, companies, and brands that I have identified as potential and prospective clients. This allows me to click on this list and listen, observe, and watch what is going on. I love the absolute openness of Twitter! You can be a complete voyeur and watch, listen, and learn about potential clients and even competitors.  There has never been anything else on the internet that is this open and is essentially a stream of consciousness of people and what is going on right that minute!

Bonus/Advanced

You can create a Twitter widget for one of your lists and then load that widget onto your website or blog. So, I could take all the tweets from everyone in the #momsrunning list and feed them right into my blog. To create these free widgets, go to http://twitter.com/about/resources. You can also customize this widget to exactly match your web colors too!

Twitter Lists are a wonderful and very powerful tool to better manage your Twitter experience. Don’t ignore this awesome enhancement. Go ahead and create a list today and see how it will change your time on Twitter for the better!

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MELISSA LIERMAN loves Social Media and travels across the United States and Canada speaking and training on Social Media. She specializes in doing workshops on Social Media for Business. The online world is constantly changing and growing and Melissa has found it to be THE single most powerful and wonderful place for making friends, meeting moms, and connecting with clients all over the world! Melissa is a night owl and you can often find her tweeting on twitter late into the night - send her a tweet and say hello http://www.twitter.com/TimeOutMom.

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