As a Twitter user, I use setup lists. These lists are made up of Twitter users that I select from different categories, interests and needs. Besides creating lists, I also subscribe to lists created by other Twitter users. Twitter lists allow me to focus my attention in a more orderly manner than the general stream, which gets me dizzy most of the time by the sheer amount of information it contains.
Lists in a B2B context
Whether or not you are new to social media or Twitter, and supposing you’re following users that matter to you, the first thing you must do is “listen” to what is being tweeted and start making sense of it all.
Once you get the idea of what’s going on and who’s who, you can start engaging with the “community” and users through posts, hashtags, quotes and direct messages. Oh, and create lists to control the avalanche of tweets.
To learn how to create and manage lists, I advise reading this page from Twitter. By the way, a user can be included in more than one list. Interestingly enough, you don’t need to be following a user to add them to a list.
Want to take the pulse of your industry? Create a list of industry experts, suppliers and news sources. Want some business intelligence on your competition? Why not create a list? Want to create a list of members of your weekly business group? How about creating a private list?
Private and public lists
A private list will be for your eyes only. Only you can access it.
Anyone can see a public list. You can share your public list with others as Twitter will generate a link to it, i.e.: https://twitter.com/i/#!/username/listname
A public list is useful because other users can subscribe to it. For example, you can follow a list of one of your colleagues. You can also invite people to subscribe to a given list.
If you want to know if you’ve been included in someone’s public list, you can go to your “List” tab from Twitter and click on “Member of.” Note that you have the possibility to opt out of a public list.
Get organized
Lists are a great way to harness the power of Twitter. It can help your Twitter experience and facilitate reading what matters most to you and interaction with other users. It can also be a great market research tool.
Today, Twitter lets you make up to 1,000 lists (up from 20) which can include up to 5,000 accounts each (up from 500)! This feature will make Twitter open for integration with social customer relationship management systems (sCRM).
Meanwhile, you can use lists for your business in a powerful manner. Take some time to get acquainted with lists. It will give you another perspective on how Twitter can be useful for your business, facilitate interactions and provide better business intelligence daily.
