Making the Most of Twitter Lists for Your Business

It is great that you have jumped right into Twitter and that you are leveraging it for your business. With all of those Twitter followers, you need to organize them in lists so that everything goes smoothly.

The people whom you follow on Twitter are people who share a common interest with you and your business. If you don’t figure out some way to organize all of your followers and the people whom you follow, you will have chaos.

At this point, you should create lists that help you to organize your followers into logical categories. Setting up Twitter lists is easy and very straightforward.

1. Go to your Twitter profile
    
2. Select the “Lists” button
    
3. Select “New List” from the drop-down menu
    
4. Enter the name of the new list. You should choose a name that you will remember easily
    
5. Before you actually create the list, you need to decide whether you want to make it public. Your public lists will appear on your profile and other people will be able to subscribe to those lists. It is your choice whether to share your lists with other people
    
6. Select the “Create List” button and you will see your new list on the main screen of your Twitter feed in the right column
    
7. Now that you have a new list in Twitter, you can start adding whichever followers you wish. Begin by selecting the Twitter handle for whichever follower you wish to add to your list and then select “Lists” on the profile of that particular follower

There are several different lists that you can use that will really benefit you and your business and which will help you to make the most out of Twitter, an amazing social media tool.

• Follow the influential people: The first step is to find influential people on Twitter who are a part of your niche. You should organize them into a list so that you are always kept current regarding the discussions that they are having with other people.
   
• Allow the influential people to follow you: If you want people in your niche to pay attention to you, find out if they have a Twitter account, create a list of people in that niche and add them to your list. After you have put them on your list, let them know. It is a wonderful way to begin a relationship.
   
• Understand who is following you: A wonderful way to learn about your Twitter followers is by engaging in discussions with them. It is critical that you really listen to them and not just converse on a superficial level. You will learn a great deal about them from your discussions. Through your engagement with them, you will start to gather more and more topics for the content that you share with other people online. You will gain insight into what they want to read about, whether their interests are in products and/or services. A good way to build up your list is by either exporting the Emails that you receive to your address book (if your list is not very long) or using a service to help you export and manage your list of followers.
   
• Keep up with the technology: Technology is changing so rapidly nowadays that you need to constantly learn about new offerings. The more you know, the more you will be positioning yourself as a savvy subject matter expert.
   
• Monitor the blogs that you choose to participate in: When it comes to the generation of content, blogging is an extremely powerful way to go. You should try to be the first person to comment so that you get the most attention for you and your business and the most online exposure. People will remember you if you consistently start discussions on interesting and educational topics. You should follow your favorite bloggers on Twitter, which will practically guarantee that you are among the first to learn new information. Bloggers very often choose Twitter as their first social media channel to post updated information.
   
• Pay close attention to your competition: If you want to learn and grow in your business, a smart way to do that is to watch what your competition is doing with Twitter. If you watch your strongest competitors, you will easily be able to understand what works and what doesn’t work.
   
• Create papers for your niche: In Twitter, you are able to post updates in a newspaper-like format. The content of those papers is drawn from your own tweets, #hashtags and Twitter lists. You are able to make a list of the sources that you like best and then create papers for the benefit of all of your Twitter followers so that you can showcase the best material from your followers’ updates. People will really love that.

A really great way to put a good list together is to examine the lists that the other experts in your niche put together. If you see that the experts have put a list of reputable people on their list, it is the right list for you to have. The following are good websites for finding lists that have been created by other people:

• TwitterCounter Top 100 Twitter Lists: This tracks statistics of Twitter users. You simply type in your Twitter address and your statistics will pop up
   
• TweepML: This allows you to maintain and share your lists with your Twitter followers
   
• TweetFind: This is a Twitter directory that contains Twitter lists. It is a smooth way to bring businesses and clients together
   
• Listorious: This is a 3^rd-party website that manages an organized directory of Twitter lists. It allows you to search through the lists by category so that you can find the most popular lists
   
• Listatlas: This simplifies Twitter lists by ranking them based on the number of followers that are contained within any given list.

Organizing your Twitter lists

You are able to access all of the Twitter lists that you have put together and are following from your Twitter homepage. The management tools on Twitter can assist you with viewing all of your lists at the same time. For example, HootSuite and Tweetdeck, enable you to create columns for each one of your lists.

Conclusion

Now that you understand the concepts of how to create Twitter lists, it is up to you to start using it in the most effective way for you and your business. There is no limit on what you can do when it comes to Twitter lists. Your lists will grow over time and you will find yourself asking what you ever did before you used that tool for your business.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. Please contact us at CompuKol Communications for further discussion on how we might be able to assist you and your team.