Twitter’s new lists feature greatly enhances the process of discovering good people to follow.
I recently posted my initial Twitter Lists and we also created lists for @darwineco. Here are some useful Twitter List ideas from others. First, Rob Paterson posted, Twitter Lists: 1st Insight.
Among other things he wrote, “What I have immediately seen from the new lists that are emerging around …(my) related areas of my interest is that I have some real gaps. Those that created the lists whom I like care for and admire have people that I don’t know and who don’t know me.”
This has also been our experience both in our own personal Twitter feeds as well as our Darwineco one. We have been listed by some people that we were not aware of and on all of the lists that mention us we have found new people with common interests. As a result I am now following new people either through my lists and/or directly.
Twitip offered ways to create an extremely useful list. It wrote to create a very specific list name. This has been our practice. You should also promote the twitter list elsewhere. This is a general good practice for social media. They suggested that you link to twitter lists from your blog, especially a company one. We are doing this at the Darwin Discovery Engine Blog and I also put a listing on the side bar of this blog. .
They also go on to write about 8 things to consider using Twitter Lists. You can use it as an extension of the TweetDeck groups function. This has been our case as it was easier to create new topic specific lists than creating new TweetDeck groups and wading though all the people we are following.
One easy way to do this is to look at lists on the topic that others created and they with a single click you can pick people you like and add them to your list on the topic. We found new people, as well as easy access to the Twitter feed of people we know and want to follow.
You can easily identify what types of people users follow and you can easily get the tone of a group. The ability to scan over a list makes this possible, you can see what lists you appear on. This enables you to discover people with similar interests as noted above and reciprocate with the list creator.
Finally, I learned through Twitter (via @VMaryAbraham) about 10 Twitter List widgets from ReadWriteWeb that you can grab and embed. They pointed out that addition to allowing users to create their own curations, Twitter has also added a basic widget-maker for adding tweets from any user’s list to any given website. As a service they used this feature to allow access ten great lists including one from Robert Scoble and one that is the entire ReadWriteWeb Team.
Twitter Lists continue to be an interesting way to bring more awareness to what is happening on the Web. I will come back to this topic again.
