Twitter Switches It Up Twitter Lists December 16, 2009
How to Effectively Utilize Twitter Lists for Business
Just when you thought that you were getting the hang of how to use Twitter for business the social networking site went and changed things up on you! They’ve added a new function called Twitter Lists. Should you use them? How should you use them? Although it takes a little bit of adjusting to get used to this new function, Twitter lists are actually terrific for your business. You can use them to organize your Twitter contacts, decrease the size of your live Twitter stream to make it more manageable and secretly track the activities of your competitors on the site.
The main thing about Twitter lists that makes them so great is that they provide an easy and functional method of organizing your Twitter contacts. You can separate the people who you follow into a variety of different lists. For example, you can have lists for clients, lists for people you collaborate with, lists for bloggers you like to follow and lists for personal friends. This is great because it means that you can sign on to Twitter and only do the things there that you want to do at that time. Instead of getting lost answering personal Tweets during business hours you can go straight to your list of clients and communicate only with them.
It is possible to use these Twitter lists to decrease the size of your live Twitter stream. That is because you can follow lists instead of following individuals. Let’s say that you have a few clients that you need to stay in touch with but they’re the kind of people who update Twitter too many times throughout the day. Remove them from your main Twitter stream but follow them through a list and you’ve eliminated the annoyance without offending the client.
Finally you should take note of the option that Twitter lists give you to follow your competitors without them realizing how much attention you are paying to what they do. That’s because Twitter lets you create lists and set them as “private” so that nobody else knows you are following them. Create a private list of all of your top competitors and stay in the loop about what they’re doing online. This activity puts you ahead of them in the competition and they don’t even realize what’s going on!
