Put simply, a Twitter List is a curated group of Twitter users that allows you to efficiently organise your users in various groups, which enables you to better manage your Tweets.
No matter how many people you’re following on Twitter, lists offer sanity-saving organisation and targeting, allowing you to engage more effectively.
You can subscribe to a list created by another user, or, preferably, you can create your own. By creating your own list, you can easily follow the tweets of a specific groups of users separate from the ones that follow you.
Creating a Twitter list is easy, you just need to go to your profile page on Twitter, click on ‘Lists’ on the left-hand side and then select ‘New List’ at the top of the page. You can create a name and description for the list and specify whether it is public (where any users can subscribe to it) or private. After saving your list, you can add members by clicking on their profile and can add or remove a user from a list at any time.
Ways to Use Twitter Lists to Grow your Profile 1. Keep an eye on the competition
Twitter is a fantastic tool to keep an eye on your competition, however you don’t want to reward competitors with a follow or let them know you’re monitoring activity on the platform.
Because you don’t need to follow people to add them to a list, this makes private lists a great way to keep track of users you don’t necessarily want to follow. Warning: make sure that your ‘competitors list’ is set to private before you start adding accounts to it, otherwise each competitor will get a notification when you add them, and this could be a little awkward…
2. Engage with Influential People and Accounts Across your Industry
A Twitter list of influencers or other important people within your industry gives you a great collection of accounts to monitor for engagement opportunities. Set aside time each day to open up this list for some active Twitter participation so you can jump in with some responses, retweets and likes.
3. Use to collate together your client list
You may want to put together a collection of your clients so that you can keep up to date with their activities and see what they are sharing to their social media (in case it’s worth sharing to your page too). For lists like these, we recommend setting them to “Private” so you can keep some anonymity of who you worth with.
4. “Notice me” list
Ok, admit it. We all have a list of Twitter users that you wish would notice you and, eventually, follow you. By putting together a “notice me” list you can track their updates, engage with their Tweets and hopefully get a follow!
Keep this list to a maximum of 10 people to add an exclusivity feel to it.
This list is for key people that you would like to engage with and ultimately you would like them to follow you back. Once a person in this list follows you, them from this list and add a new “notice me” person.
5. Keeping up to date with the news
This list should include a list of news-based accounts both national and local. From this list you can see what’s going on in the county / country /world and enables you to keep on top of any breaking news that may be worth sharing across your page.
6. Location-based lists
Here’s where you can spread a little local love! Make a list of Twitter users or companies in your nearby neighbourhood. The people on this list would generally not be linked to your business directly, however they may share news that may be of use to your followers.
These are just some basic lists to get you started. Once you’ve started creating a couple of lists, you can come up with your own ideas. Some need to know facts when it comes to creating your lists include:
• You can see who is subscribing to your Twitter lists (if they are public). • You can see what lists you are a member of. To see this, from the main lists page click the three dots at the top right-hand side (next to the create lists icon) and click on “Lists you’re on”. • You can edit/delete a list at any time. Simply click on the list and select the ‘Edit List’ button. • You can subscribe to other people’s lists. To do this click on the profile page and click on the three dots next to the “message” icon. Select “View Lists” and it will bring up a list of all the public lists that the user has. Choose the list you would like to subscribe to and then select “follow”.
So, there you have it, a brief look into the world of Twitter Lists!
We hope you find great use out of this feature and there are tons of unique ways to put lists into practice. A great tool for your business, set aside some time to have a play around with creating lists of your own.
For help on creating Twitter Lists get in touch with the team at hello@socialsoda.co.uk
