One of the main reasons you follow people on Twitter is because you want to hear what they have to say (that’s the theory anyway…conversely you just want to spam them with your junk). The problem is that over time you are likely start following a lot of people, and by a lot I mean more people that you can actually physically stay up to date with.
If you are a bleeding edge tech professional then Twitter lists are like sooo 2009 but for everyone else you may not be using them to their full potential, if at all. Here is my method for maximising the benefits that Twitter lists can offer your business by becoming a better listener.
Be like Moses and part the Red Sea (of data)
Segregating your data stream into more manageable little trickles is probably the greatest (and most obvious) benefit that lists in Twitter can provide. I have talked about your business data tree previously and you can take this approach when you organise your Twitter feed as well. There are four primary lists I setup for any Twitter account I manage – check out this site for a background on lists and this tutorial on how to setup lists in Tweetdeck to get started on the technical side of things.
1. Colleagues and Competitors
These are the people you work with directly or are competing against. They are your clients, your workmates or other people working in your industry that you know. You should be following them all as what they say is probably going to be important for you to know. If all they talk about is what they had for dinner last night then at least you know they aren’t using Twitter to get ahead in their business – good news for you!
2. Market Targets and Industry Leaders
These are the people you want to learn from, to understand how the hell they got to be so successful (hint: hard work may be something they talk about…). They are often referred to as ‘thought leaders’ in many industries so keep an eye on what they are saying. Often they will have a personal account and also a company/media account eg Robert Scoble has multiple accounts setup to designate between his blog posts/resources stream, his personal account and his video content so you can choose which one to follow depending on where you see value.
3. Resources
Pretty self-explanatory – all those great sites out there that you follow via their blogs or RSS feeds probably also have a Twitter account you can follow to get ‘real-time’ information. This column is probably going to be a pretty massive stream in itself as resource sites tend to tweet out links etc quite often so you can break this down even further into logical categories.
4. Personal
You are probably following people that actually do have interesting things for dinner or you care regardless (OMG Kayne had TOAST today!)… My personal column is where all these people tweet to and it’s a nice distraction every 2 hours or so – any more often and you can get easily lost in the social media black hole.
So if you have Tweetdeck or some other Twitter client you will now have 4 or more nice shiny new columns that match the lists you have created. There are loads of other columns that you can include in your Twitter stream that aren’t related to lists like search terms or mentions but I won’t go into those right now. By separating all your twitter content into smaller streams you can target your ‘listening’ and generally absorb much more of what comes past so go get your lists in order now!
