“Followers” decline as Twitter list popularity rises
Jan 17, 2010 Online Marketing TIPS for your Business, Social Media Marketing Victoria, Social Networking Online
Twitter is innovating – which is a good thing. Recently they have introduced “lists” to their platform and have partnered with Google to bring us live search and with LinkedIn to make it easier to integrate tweets within LinkedIn status updates. One thing we are going to notice, however, (that could be a bit confusing) is that the term “follower” won’t be as clear-cut anymore.
If you want to receive a person’s updates without having them clutter your main Twitter feed, simply add them to one of your lists without following them. They won’t show up as someone you are “following” this way, but the person will be able to see that you have “listed” them (unless you add them to a private list) and you’ll have to click on that list when you want to see what they’re posting. On the side of private lists, they are truly private, so some people will create a list of “competitors”, for example, that they can monitor without anyone knowing about it. There’s nothing sneaky about that either because everyone knows that when you tweet it’s available for the world to view.
I like this new list functionality because it allows me to organize the masses of tweets that come in every day and helps to ensure I won’t miss updates from those I see as valuable content aggregators and producers. I also like that I can visit the pages of those I respect on Twitter and see how they have organized people into lists. If someone has a great list called “ComediansOnTwitter” for example, I can add that list to my account. Right now I am in the middle of conglomerating a list of Eateries in Victoria so that every time I am hungry and want to grab a bite at a local restaurant/cafe/pub, I can see what the specials are at all the local food joints that tweet. Feel free to follow the list if you like.
One issue I have is that in programs like Tweetdeck where I started organizing people into lists long before Twitter came up with their own version, I now have a whole bunch of lists with duplicates that desperately need cleaning up….in my spare time! Yikes.
However – remember that if you don’t follow the person they can’t DM (direct message) you anymore and that might be a barrier to a prospective customer.
What do you think of Twitter lists?
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