Tag Archives: twitter lists

5 great tips on using Twitter lists

Twitter lists maybe less sexy than their cousins; Twitter hashtags, but they are still very useful and can provide many benefits for businesses.

Whilst hashtags focus conversations around a topic or theme, Twitter lists group together people and their tweets. You can create your own lists or follow the lists of others. Selecting a list allows you to view all members of the list and their tweets. You should note that you can’t send a ‘group tweet’ to everyone on a list - you can only read tweets. Twitter lists can be public but you can also make them private which is useful for creating a list of clients or prospects that you don’t want to make visible to others.

Here are 5 great tips on using Twitter lists:

1) Follow competitors in secret - add one or more competitors to a private list. You can then follow their tweets without actually ‘following’ them. If there’s anyone you don’t wish to follow but wish to view their tweets you can adopt the same approach.

2) Follow other peoples’ lists - there’s often no need to create a list as others might have already compiled one. For example, if want a list of businesses on Twitter in your town, it might already exist. Rather than create a new one from scratch you can simply follow it.

3) Discover lists - Want to discover public lists that others have created? You can search for and find Twitter lists of interest at Listorious and TwitterCounter.

4) Find out which lists you’ve been added to - you can find out which Twitter lists you’ve been added to by going your profile, selecting Lists on the top left hand side then ‘Member of’ - see below. Recent additions are displayed on your Interactions tab.

5) View lists on apps - you can view tweets from lists outside of twitter.com on apps like TweetDeck and Flipboard (IoS only). The former lets you create view your list in a column alongside your timeline, mentions and key words. The latter presents the contents of your list in a glossy magazine style format.

How do you use Twitter lists? Let me know in the Comments below.

How to create and use Twitter lists

Twitter lists help you organise people and their tweets into groups. Lists can either be public which people can subscribe to or private which can only be viewed by the creator of the list. Viewing the timeline of a list will show you a stream of tweets from the users on that list. It’s really straightforward to add someone to a Twitter list:

1) Select the head and shoulders icon that represents the profile of the person you wish to add
2) Select the drop down menu
3) The select ‘Add or remove from lists’
4) You can then create a new list or select a tick box to add the person to one of your existing Twitter Lists

You can also create a new list from your Lists page which you can access via Lists on your Profile page. You can view tweets from any Lists on this page by selecting it. You can have up to 20 Twitter lists and a maximum number of 500 people per list.

Twitter lists can be used in a number of ways:

Segment people your following - create lists for suppliers, prospects, clients  or people that tweet about a particular subject. This helps you focus on a particular type of person and their tweets.

Group people you’re not following - you don’t have to be following someone to add them to a list. For example, if might be useful to have a list of local people but you might not want to follow them all.

Research - you don’t always need to create your own lists as often someone has done the work so you can subscribe or follow their public lists. For example, if you want to find out which businesses in Cheltenham are on Twitter you can subscribe to @glosjobs glosbiz lists.

 

 

 

 

 

Monitor the competition - you could create a private lists of your competitors making it easier to see keep an eye on their activity.

Engage with your clients - set up a private list of your clients making it easier to keep in touch and engage in conversation.

Pro tip: If you use Tweet Deck or Hoot Suite you can add a column containing a list making lists more accessible than they are on twitter.com.

For more help with Twitter download my 100 Twitter tips or attend one of my regular Cheltenham social media workshops.