Manage Your Twitter Community More Easily With Twitter Lists
When you start building up your Twitter community, it’s easy to get lost in the mix and have a flooded Twitter feed that you can’t even imagine wading through for anything useful. You’ve followed people just for following you, you follow industry peers, some friends, your favorite sports teams and your Twitter following list looks like a pile of jumbled categories screaming for attention like an overcrowded high school cafeteria.
Have you ever wondered how social media agencies can most efficiently manage Twitter? How can you trim the fat but keep your community connected? You should have a somewhat balanced following/follower ratio also, so how do you keep those numbers up and still be able to use Twitter effectively?
Enter: Twitter Lists
Twitter lists allow you to segment your Twitter feed into different lists of people you follow. This way you can more easily read through the feeds of segments that you are interested in at the time. You can continue to follow people without them constantly cluttering your feed. Best of all, since Twitter Lists are a part of Twitter itself and not a separate app or program, they’re maintained across all (at least to my knowledge at the time of writing) Twitter apps that you may already be using.
You should segment your Twitter community into at least 6 different lists to help manage your business profile more easily. Here are the six lists that I always start with for a client and tailor it depending on their needs:
1. Competition
This list is of all of your competitors. You’ll want to keep an eye on what they’re doing so you know if there’s anything you need to get ahead on and how well they are performing. A good thing about Twitter lists is that you don’t need to be following someone in order to add them to a list.
2. Media
Following industry journalists for traditional and new media and keeping them organized in this list is an easy way to find opportunities to get your company in the news and noticed by a larger audience. It will also help you build positive relationships with industry journalists.
3. Potential Customers
Finding your potential customers on Twitter either via a Twitter search or after you’ve been in touch but before you have closed your sale is a great way to be top of mind while they are going through their purchasing process. It will give you a chance to answer any questions they may have and also actively reach out to them with information you think they’ll find useful and help them choose you to hire.
4. Industry Resources
Industry resources can be a list of news, industry leaders or big time players in your field that you’re not quite up to par with and can ReTweet their information to get on their radar and also providing their quality content with your followers.
5. Strategic Partners
Strategic Partners are other businesses they share a similar target audience as you but are not your direct competition. This way you can help each other provide the demographic with useful information and potential services without stepping on toes. An example of a good strategic partnership would be a personal trainer and a nutritionist.
6. Engaged Community
I recently discovered this idea and use the great tool IFTTT to segment my engaged list. Anytime someone mentions me in a Tweet (and you could also add in follows you to this list if you don’t want to follow most people back), it adds them to the Engaged Twitter List. That way I can browse through and keep track of who’s talking to me and following me long after we’ve interacted. A lot of times you’ll lose track of someone who ReTweeted you or sent you a good answer to a question a few weeks ago and this can surely help you there.
Are You Segmenting Your Twitter Feed Into Lists?
What tricks do you use for your Twitter lists? Do you have any other suggestions for a starting point on creating Twitter lists for your business?