Twitter Lists: Relevance Is In the Eye of The Beholder

Now that the dust has settled on the new “Twitter Lists” feature, I’d like to share my thoughts on what this means for the Twitter community as well as any brands who use Twitter to connect with their audience.

First a refresher on lists: Twitter Lists is a new function where users can organize the people they follow into groups by type. They can name that list and make it public. When people come to your profile they can see all the public lists you have, and all the public lists you are on. These lists work similar to Facebook’s lists where you can click on a link to the list to see an update stream including only members of that group, making it easier to read updates from people you actually listen to.

Now, what Twitter Lists is going to change:

1. Help weed out the fakes

Yes, you can use some sort of spam-bot autofollow feature to drum up insane amounts of followers over short periods of time. However, if you have tens of thousands of followers, but are only on 1 list, it’ll be pretty clear to people that those followers aren’t genuinely listening to you. I think pretty soon we’ll be looking at a followers/list ratio to determine influence rather than simply follower count or a follower/following ratio.

2. Make it easier to find interesting people

Let’s say you’re a “foodie” and you follow this one guy who’s always tweeting about really great places to eat and you really like the stuff he sends out. You head over to his profile and check out his lists. There on the top is his “Best Food Critics” list. You click on that and immediately you have a list of potential people to follow vetted by someone you already respect. This same model works in any industry or category. And it can also work for brands – need to find people who are into fashion? Find one major fashion tweeter and click on their “Favorite Fashion Bloggers” list – instant contact list for you to follow or reach out to.

3. People can follow lists instead of other people

There’s a function to follow a list – all this does is add a link to that list in your profile. You don’t actually follow the individuals, so they don’t show up in your main feed all the time. But you if you want to catch up with the updates from the people on that particular list, you can easily click through. Almost like a saved search.

This will give people the ability to follow things they care about occassionally. Like if you find a “Politicians” list compiled by Time. You don’t want to follow all those people in your main feed. But you might want to pop into that list’s stream every so often to see what’s being discussed there. That way you can see what all the senators (from both sides) have to say during a televised press conference, but not have to see their updates every day.

Lists also come with an API feature. That means you can build a list and then incorporate that stream into a Web site or application. The example Twitter provided of this was the Huffington Post creating lists around the World Series: one for baseball sports writers, one for people associated with the Yankees, and one for people with the Phillies. All three lists show up on the Web site side by side and people can read what’s being discussed by people who’ve been chosen by the organization. Assuming you trust that organization to pick the right people, it’s very convenient. It’s a similar concept to the hashtag, but without the possiblity of some weirdo selling Viagra throwing the hashtag into their tweet in attempt to get seen on the real-time feed at the event (and we’ve all seen that happen…)

 

Conclusion:

As we’re seeing across the board in social networks, this is a shift towards increasing relevance for users by emphasizing people and brands who are providing the most valuable content. If you’re putting out something that people like, you’ll make it onto lists where people will find you. If you all you’re doing is tweeting out garbage, you’ll fall by the wayside, no matter how many followers you have. You can’t even count on the impression anymore, on Twitter or Facebook. Before, if you had a follower or fan and you wrote an update, they would see it. Now with all the changes in lists and updated streams – they’ll only see updates from content they deem interesting.

 

What do you think? Like lists or not? Leave me a comment. Also, don’t forget to check out our Sitewire Employee List to see what we’ve all got to say.

Tagged as: social content, social media relevance, twitter, twitter lists