Using Twitter Lists

Now that Twitter Lists have been rolled out to all Twitter accounts and we’ve had time to use and work out the best use of lists I though it’d be a great idea to write a post about how we have implemented using lists and how you can too.

What Is Twitter Lists?

Before I go into how to use Twitter Lists I thought I probably should give you an overview of what they are in case you were wondering.

If you have used a Twitter API app like TweetDeck, Seesmic or PeopleBrowsr you would know that you were able to group different “twits” so you could follow their tweets more closely, and in a nutshell that’s what Twitter Lists do. They give you the ability to “group” or “list” people that you are interested in on Twitter to make sure that you don’t miss any of their tweets. The biggest difference between Twitter Lists and the groups that you could create on TweetDeck etc, you are able to share the Lists that you have created so others can follow your favorite twits.

How To Use Twitter Lists For Business

Now we’ve had access to the Twitter Lists since they were released in BEAT quite awhile ago, so I’ve been playing around with them to see how effective they are and also how they can increase the amount of targeted Twitter traffic to a website/blog or increase a businesses sales.

We decided that we would use Twitter Lists to target small to medium business on Twitter that we believe could use help with their Internet Marketing that were based in Sydney. You might be asking why? The main reason being is that when we do consulting we prefer to do it on a face to face basis and we knew that if we targeted a just a small section of the market to start with it would be easier for us to manage and generate new and more sales.

What We Did

So we created a Twitter List called “sydtweets” and put about 22 twits into the list so we could follow them and interact with them. By only having a small amount of people in that List we were able to make sure that we didn’t miss any of their tweets. We then followed a list that someone had created that had about 200 Sydney small businesses in it that they were following.

We monitored these two lists for a couple of days and started to @ reply some of the tweeple just to get some interaction with them, on our third day of monitoring we noticed someone was about to send out their first ever email newsletter and wanted someone to review it before they sent it out, we offered to review it and they sent it to us. We sent them some suggested changes and they emailed us back asking if we did consulting, so by us just monitoring a specific group of people we were able to generate new sales into our business.

Your Step by Step Guide

1. Create a Twitter List that follows a small amount of people that fit your “perfect customer”.
2. Monitor the tweets that the people in the list tweet, and interact with the people in your list.
3. If anyone asks a question or for help make sure you respond.
4. @ reply people suggestions that they can use in their business because that will then open doors for you to do more work with them if they like you suggestions.
5. Most importantly be fun and happy when your on Twitter.