Enhance Your Twitter Use With Lists

Social media phenomenon Twitter is on everyone’s radar screens these days. Never before have we been able to see so clearly into the eyes of friends, acquaintances, others who share similar interests or corporate marketing people. This newfound freedom and openness of communication has really taken us by storm, even though we are only able to get glimpses of our fellow communicators, 140 characters at a time.

While there are many fans, there are a good number of detractors as well and criticism of Twitter revolves around the fact that it is quite simply unmanageable to the layman. You only need to have a few followers to quickly become entranced by the constant flow of tweets. Indeed you have to try and understand the very concept of the medium to decipher some of these tweets, peppered as they are with “bit.ly” references, @ characters and grammatically incorrect sentences obviously designed to cram the message within the available space.

As your Twitter membership continues, the trickle of tweets becomes a monsoon and it is difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff and get any benefit from this fast flowing tide of information. You can quickly lose sight of the very benefit that Twitter was designed for.

While a couple of applications already exist to help you organize your tweeting world into some semblance of order, Twitter is likely to add specific functionality to help you keep your sanity. While the process is still in beta mode right now, it seems likely that you will have an option to allow you to organize your people into specific lists. You can come up with lists according to any number of categories, based on friends, acquaintances, local businesses, brands, topics or keywords.

Now, when you receive tweets they will be organized into the categories that you specify, giving you a feeling of much greater control over your tweet-dom. Your lists will, by default, be displayed as part of your profile and this could be particularly advantageous from a marketing perspective as you will now be able to see individuals classified as important in relation to your keywords and can opt to follow all of these people.

This is likely to be one of the most significant steps forward in the short history of the company and was introduced at the behest of users, according to Twitter developers. Expect to see this functionality incorporated into many new apps, as it will also be made available within API to external programmers.

Is this development overdue?

Matthew Toren