Do you want to grow your business? Want to build relationships to key influencers in your industry and collaborate with them to grow your brand? What if I told you you could do this by using one simple tool: twitter lists.
While I previously couldn’t be bothered with Twitter Lists, I’ve recently discovered their magic and the profound impact they can have on your business. So, let’s talk first about the philosophy, and then we’ll hit the facts.
My favorite use for Twitter lists (and Twitter in general) is to build relationships. Building relationships through Twitter is an amazing way to engage in joint venture work – collaborations that benefit you and the person you’re working with because you get in front of each other’s audiences and lists.
Building relationships through Twitter is an amazing way to engage in joint venture work – collaborations that benefit you and the person you’re working with because you get in front of each other’s audiences and lists.
It’s pretty simple. Keep a list of people you want to build a relationship with.
- follow them,
- retweet their good stuff,
- respond to their questions, and
- learn about them.
Over time this can build your online relationship and naturally can lead to not only a genuine friendship, but all kinds of great things for you and your business: collaborations, sponsorships, publicity, education, partnerships, and a host of other opportunities.
Building relationships with people through Twitter can lead to collaborations, sponsorships, publicity, education, partnerships, and a host of other opportunities.
We’re always engaging with people on Twitter and inviting them to try our meetings, sign up for our list, or come to our events. I’ve engaged randomly with Twitter users that have ended up in really fun collaborations both locally and internationally, like the collaboration in the works with @MumsMeanBusiness – a group of Mompreneurs across the pond in the UK.
Here are some tips to follow when building your lists:
- You can keep your lists public or private. In fact, you may have already had a pop-up on Twitter telling you someone’s added you to their list. This means it’s a public list, and you can even follow the list if you want. Keeping your own lists private is good if you have an angle to following people, like if you’re keeping a list of people you want to build relationships with, or if you’re categorizing people by a certain influencer level. Making a list public can be good because other people can follow your curated list and it can add to your credibility. There’s also functionality in having lists be public. We have a list of Femworking members that is public, that way all of our members can easily follow and support each other.
- You can add people to your lists without following them, which can be a way to “try them out” and see if you like their feed. This might be good if you run into the Dirty Little Twitter Secret problem I’ve blogged about before: when you follow too many people and Twitter prevents you from following more.
- Some examples of lists you may want to keep are: industry experts, members of a particular organization (in our case, the Femworkers list), national brands, potential sponsors, local business-related rock stars (my list is called DMV business stars, for the DC-Maryland-Virginia area), national brands you’d like to work with, and collaboration hopefuls.
- You can save time by subscribing and following other people’s lists. This can be incredibly useful and takes a burden off of you! #timesaver! We encourage our Femworkers to follow our new Femworking members list so they can follow and support each other!
- You can have up to 1000 lists, with 5000 handles on each list (be careful here though, having 5000 names on a list *may* defeat the purpose of having a curated list of people who’s content you want to check out!)
Building lists is easy! Just navigate here and click “Create New List” on the right.
And that’s it! I hope this will help you get started using Twitter to build relationships that grow your business.
What kinds of Twitter Lists can you make? How could lists help you build relationships and potentially grow your business?
*Photo courtesy David Goehring.