Businesses Should Pay Attention to Twitter Lists
Online Branding and Marketing Impacts of Twitter's Latest Function
Oct 30, 2009
Twitter Lists were rolled out to the masses in late October, 2009. This was primarily intended to provide users with a means to better organize the vast numbers of accounts they are following.
Because the default setting on every new list is Public, Twitter Lists are also intended to serve as a discovery tool to find new people to follow, and to "see and be seen".
Busy People Can Use Lists to Improve Time Management
After the effort of the initial setup, busy corporate Twitter users can benefit from the enhanced organization and sorting capabilities provided by the Twitter Lists tool.
By segmenting the accounts they follow into useful groups, such as customers, leads, networking, colleagues, team members, and competitors, a business person can prioritize the tweets he or she reads regularly.
Business Twitter Accounts can Gauge Visibility and Relevance based on Lists
Many businesses already use Twitter to "see and be seen" in the conversations that are going on online. Twitter lists can provide insight into how the business is seen and how the brand is percieved by Twitter followers. They can help provide key information as to why business account followers are actually following the account!
In the right-hand navigation, there is now a new category beside "following" and "followers," it is "Listed." (Listed has been circled in red in screenshot below on left.)
On a Twitter user's own profile, this will show how many people have added that account to a list. Users can also click on this link to discover who has added them to their lists, and how they have categorized their Twitter account.
- Are colleagues, affiliates, subordinates following and listing a business Twitter Account? Lists are going to be as important as Follow Fridays for getting an account name out to Twitter and in attracting new followers.
- Are competitors following the business Twitter Account? Of course, the business account administrator should have been aware of them when they started following the account, but if it's a personal account, it may have been less than obvious.
- Perhaps business Twitter users can discover a new potential area for business based on lists they are included in. For example, Whole Foods Market has a strong store-by-store Twitter presence. Perhaps a Whole Foods store will notice that a large number of people have listed their store account under "fair trade" lists or perhaps "gluten-free." And using that information, they can reach out to a market segment that they may have otherwise ignored.
- What is the account-holder's personal brand? What does a Twitter Account really say about that brand? If this account is strictly personal, an individual might discover which interests he or she tweets about the most. If the account is connected to the company brand name, the company's marketing department may use lists to discover how a brand is viewed in the marketplace.
SEO, Social Bookmarking, and Twitter Lists
Everyone who is even vaguely aware of search engine optimization techniques understands the importance of back-links. (One-way, voluntary (unpaid) links from unaffiliated websites back to the optimized page.) For SEO purposes, these are still some of the most important kinds of links a site can get.
Slightly less important for Search Engine ranking, social bookmarking tools are great for visibility, traffic and additional keyword context. Social bookmarking tools, such as Delicious or StumbleUpon are used to group and tag similar sites for personal use. Websites that have links and a presence on such sites show a certain amount of relevance to those tags associated with their URL. Search engines may not give a great deal of "link juice" to this, however, it does support online credibility and consistency across a brand.
Think of Twitter lists as social bookmarks and "tags" for a Twitter account. There will probably not be direct SEO benefit (because the lists link to a Twitter profile, not a homepage) of being included in a relevant Twitter List. However, there is certainly a potential for increased visibility, and additional relevance in a field to be included in such lists.
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