Well, it looks like our Hot PJ Twitter account has been selected to be part of a small group (probably about 100,000 or so!) that can try out Twitter lists before it’s unleashed on the Twitter-verse.

So what are Twitter lists?

Twitter lists are groups of similar Twitter accounts, as assigned by the person that created the list. Let’s say I have a lot of followers in New Zealand and Australia but I want to organise a meet-up in Christchurch. I could create a generic update that says “Meet-up in Christchurch. Reply if you’re keen”, which might get not get a great deal of notice from my followers as it’s lost amongst other updates.

To get more of a response, I could go through my followers list, find out which people are from Christchurch and send each one of them an @reply. This would greatly increase the number of responses but would take a lot more effort – sending 30 to 50 individual replies – and really annoy my other followers!

With the new list function, I could create a list called “chc” and assign each of my connections based in Christchurch to that list. At this stage, I assume that I can then send one update directed at that entire list by using the special @ reply name.

Note that I originally created the list as “christchurch” but changed it to “chc”. This shortened the reply tag from @hotpj/christchurch to @hotpj/chc which obviously allows for more characters in the update and makes it easier for others to retweet.

By the looks of things, this creates an extra level to our Twitter URL. When the testing period has finished, you would be able to go to www.twitter.com/hotpj/chc to see all the Twitter accounts I have added to that list.

When you add someone to a list, and you’ve set the list as public, people will be able to see what lists any account has been added to. We have already been added to @slowninja’s list of “bloggers” – i.e. people that write blogs.

Anyone can now click on that list to see who’s on there. More than that, they see all the updates only from the people on the list. This is handy if you wanted to only see what Christchurch Twitter people were saying. And of course, also handy if you want to follow more people in that particular category.

These lists should help us to target our tweets a lot more and it will help to keep updates even more relevant.

Some people may think that people outside the lists will be ignored – if I’m organising a tweet-up in Christchurch and just send an @reply to the chc list, it may look like I’m excluding people in Auckland that might actually be in Christchurch at the time of the meet. This actually wouldn’t be the case – that person would still see my update if they’re following me, they just wouldn’t get any special notification like they would if I had specifically @ replied to them.

Other than regions, some handy lists would be along the lines of “People I’ve met”, “Fellow Designers”, “Quality Tweeters”, “Friends”, “Humorous Accounts” etc. – although you would want to think of some shorted names!

The danger is that if these lists are public, your followers may get jealous of those on the list! There’s also a risk that someone creates a negative list and adds you to it – at this stage of testing, there doesn’t appear to be a way to remove yourself from a list unless you actually block that whole Twitter account.

It would certainly suck to find yourself on a list called “@peoplethattalktoomuch” for example!

We’ll certainly be keeping a close eye on how the list function develops.

Disclaimer: Oh by the way, it does say that this function is in the beta testing stage and so we shouldn’t tweet about it, but we’ve checked the list of Twitter personnel and noticed that they’re happily mentioning it themselves so the news is already out!

Posted on October 30th, 2009 by Mark Lincoln
Filed under: Marketing, Social Media