Christine Marie

Twitter Lists Guide

For those of you interested in the Twitter world, you have probably come across Twitter’s new feature: Twitter Lists.

And what exactly is a Twitter List? Well, Twitter lists are a feature that allows you to group the Twitter accounts you follow. You see, when you start following many accounts it can get very hard to keep up with your feed that contains everyone’s tweets. So, Twitter lists help you organize the Twitter accounts you follow by category. Brilliant, huh?

For example, let’s say you follow people that are in the marketing business, restaurant business, flower business, and your close personal friends. What if you only felt like reading your close personal friends tweets and no business ones?

Well before Twitter lists, you had to click on each of your personal friends profile because the feed would include everyone else’s tweets. But now you could create a Twitter list and add only your personal friends to it. When you only want to read up on their tweets, you simply click on the Twitter list you created and you will see a feed with only their tweets.

Take in mind that you are able to create as many Twitter lists as you want and name them whatever your heart desires.

Now, here is another reason why Twitter lists are so wonderful. People can choose to follow your Twitter Lists and vice versa. So why is this so great? I will get to this in a minute. First, I am going to list some benefits you can get with creating Twitter lists:

Benefits of Twitter Lists:
- helps drive people to your website
- gives you a way to narrow down feeds by category (filtering)
- gives you more control
- helps your marketing plan

Now that you know what benefits Twitter lists provide, I can get back to explaining why people following your Twitter lists is so great, which will also answer the question, “How can marketers use this list to generate traffic back to your website?”

By people following your Twitter lists, you can gain more followers because you are able to reach more people. This is indirect follows. For example, let’s say you create a Twitter list that one of your followers find interesting and starts following it. If you provide useful, helpful, and relevant Twitter lists, people are going to view you as a good source to go to for information, in which you gain a follower.

You should create Twitter lists that contain useful information about your type of business. Become a source of information for your industry; people will start to view you as a thought leader.

So who do you add to your Twitter list? If you are a jewelry business, you can add people that contain useful information about jewelry. I bet you are asking if you should add your competition. Well, this one is a little tricky. It is a case by case situation. Sometimes it might seem beneficial whereas other times it should be avoided. But remember, you want to create a good useful, helpful Twitter list. So, if you sell jewelry, you can add people that sell nice jewelry boxes or people that have jewelry cleaning products or even people that have good jewelry tips. Do your research! You want to build such a great Twitter list that you’re competition will want to follow you!

Now that I’ve explained what Twitter lists are all about, let me give you a quick “Twitter List Tutorial” to setup your first Twitter list.

Steps to Creating a Twitter List:

1. Sign into your Twitter account and it will open up to your homepage.

2. On your right hand side you will see a section named “Lists”. Click on “New List”.

3. Once you click on “New List”, a box will pop up. It will ask you to enter the name of your list and it will automatically create your twitter list URL. It will also ask you to enter a description of your new Twitter list (this is optional but I do recommend you add some text so people know a little more). You can also make it “Public” or “Private”. You can make your personal ones private but make your business related ones “Public” so that others can follow your list.

Once you fill out the fields, click on “Create list”.

4. This will create your list and take you to a page where you can add users by searching for them using the search box or you can add users that you already follow. To add users that you already follow, click on “Following” under the search box.

5. This will take you to your list of followers and when you see a user that is relevant to add to your list, click on the list symbol (on the right hand side to the user) and it will open up a small box that you can check off to add to your Twitter list or create a new list.

6. Do this for every user you want and you are DONE Remember you can create as many links as you please.

7. You can share your Twitter lists by providing people with the URL that was created for you. To view your lists, go to your homepage and on the right hand side column you will see it.

If you have any other questions regarding Twitter lists, please feel free to contact me. I would be glad to help!!