Get Creative: Use Those Twitter Lists!

Tweet

Twitter lists have been around for some time now and when I mention them to friends and clients, most say they don’t really use them. Twitter even provides a primer to introduce you to lists, click here for that.

If you are familiar with the basics, let me point out a few more uses for them that go beyond the conventional reasons:

Use lists when building up your followers. At some point everyone has experienced that 2,000 follower “hurdle”. This is when you’re suddenly prevented from following more tweeps until you’re within a 10 percent ratio of followers to follows. Yes, it’s Twitter effort to slow down the spammers; otherwise they’d just keep following and following and following regardless of how few follow back.

Sigh.

Was discussing this situation with a client yesterday. I advised that he build up some more followers and get over the 2,000 hurdle. He is working hard at doing so. However, he stated “there’s plenty of people out there on Twitter that are in my neck of the woods (he is a local business) however, I really don’t want to follow them; not so sure I like what they are tweeting.”

My suggestion was to follow them and put them in a private list so that he can easily monitor them before deciding if he wants to hang on to them. He can choose to unfollow them once he gets over the 2,000 follower hurdle or keep them and remove them from the “I’m not sure about you” list.

Which brings up another point: Not all your lists have to be public. Private ones that are for your eyes only are great for monitoring your competition (when you don’t want them to know you’re paying any attention to them) or perhaps for catching up with a celebrity that really has nothing to do with your business and you feel it’s not good for your reputation to let people know that you have an interest in them. So go ahead and follow Ozzy Osbourne via a list in private then.

And did you know that you don’t have to follow someone to include them in a list?
Need a few ideas? Lists can be:

• Your favorite people, friends
• Your favorite businesses or products
• Tweeps in a certain region or city
• Tweeps that share a common interest with you
• Potential customers for your business
• Past and current customers for your business
• Celebrities that you admire
• Tweeps that post lots of quotes (perhaps they inspire you?)
• Current events and news (make sure they’re reliable sources)
• Foodies (we all do eat at some point, no?)
• Tweeps that make you laugh (we all need some comic relief sometimes)
• Causes you are interested in.
• Politicians
• Tweeps you tweet with on a regular basis.

And the lists go on!

Remember that when your lists are public, everyone can look at them. Do think about whether you want to show the world what’s on your lists or not. Any given list can be public or private and you can also change them if your preferences change in regards to display them or not.

The lists feature is there to make Twitter work better for you. Hope you’re inspired to explore the possibilities some more now.

Not a favorite tune, but it does have the word “list” in the title, plus it is Valentine’s Day so the word “kiss” is appropriate too. Have a lovely day! Click here for the video.