In today’s busy work environment you don’t have hours to spend looking for effective followers. There’s no way you can really follow 1000 people but there are ways to easily find those worth following.
Twitter lists can help you more effectively track what different people are saying that is relevant to you and your business. By filtering their updates into lists you will save time and will quickly be able to identify important information or comments made by other followers.
When you follow someone, you are publicly endorsing them but you don’t necessarily want to endorse all the people you follow. There are many people or companies who you just want to keep an eye on. A Twitter list will enable you to actually follow a person’s twitter account without actually ‘following’ them, you can group similar people/companies together and you can even keep certain groups private.
Below are examples of groups you may want to follow or watch that can be arranged into specific groups.
- It is important to keep an eye on your Competitors but you don’t ideally want to follow or be seen to follow them. It is also advantageous to keep this group private (which means that won’t know you’ve listed them).
- Schools can use twitter lists to keep an eye on problem parents or pupils who make be involved in action against the school, making negative comments about the school or its students or involved in any type of bullying or intimidation. Again it would be sensible to keep this list private.
- You can also create list of business prospects; those people or companies who you would like to do business with but aren’t yet. The tweets on this list will give you topics, viewpoints and opportunities to communicate with this list in discussions they are interested in, hence creating an good first impression of you and your company.
- You should also keep a list of people who can refer you to prospective clients. A list will enable you to see which potential clients they’re talking to.
- In the same way you can also keep lists of people who are influential in your business area of expertise or interest. You can then use these ‘industry influencers’ to amplify your business message or positive reputation.
Finally, you can keep lists of your favourite or important publication making it easier and quicker to locate a specific article when you need to refer to it in a tweet.
By having lists on Twitter you’ll be truly surprised at how much easier effective social business marketing becomes! You’ll also help your followers by giving them a wider picture of the people you’re interested in.
