Followers, followers, followers!
This is the demand of every social brand, individual or organization, in the Twitter-sphere.
According to an infographic on CTR (Click Through Rates) there is a law of diminishing returns the larger your follower counts rise. Averaging only 1.64% of tweets clicked, your challenge is to maximize the opportunity for tweets to be seen.
As Twitter users add more followers themselves, the amount of time any particular post hangs in their home feed decreases significantly making your goal to be seen more and more difficult. It is daunting.
Enter Twitter Lists.
For me, I’d rather be added to “Lists” than gain huge follower counts.
Followers build the ego, List adds build community.
For the experienced user, we know that creating Lists allows us to dramatically increase the organization of our Twitter feed. In addition, it provides more “hang time” of posts we like to follow.
The question is, how does your business get on more Twitter lists and therefore be seen more often?
1. Educate Your Community
Your brand has a tremendous opportunity to educate your community while, at the same time, increasing your brand’s value. Getting your community to maximize Lists is the gateway to growing visibility and engagement.
Create a page on your website where you share How-to Use Twitter List, why it’s valuable to your user, and the benefits of organizing the accounts one follows. Then tweet links to this page as often as is beneficial for your brand.
2. Suggest Lists for Your Community to Follow
In your research, serve your community even further with useful Lists for them to follow – either ones your team has created or ones you’ve discovered by others.
While modeling useful and valuable content curation, you train followers in becoming Twitter savvy and even more loyal to your organization.
3. Expand Your Brand’s Knowledge Base
It’s one thing to grow your brand’s community. It’s another to make your brand smarter too.
Assuming you’ve already taken the time to build your brand’s Lists, follow the Lists of other brands, thought leaders, or industries to quickly reveal what others are developing or discovering. In addition, you can do powerful searches for Lists on Listorious according to your goals.
4. Ask Your Community Questions
Now instead of merely gaining followers, your brand’s goal is to inspire followers to add you to one of their Lists. This opportunity challenges your social team to make every tweet count: connecting, empowering, and showing value.
In addition, you can periodically ask your community to add your brand to a List where it best fits. This becomes a revealing exercise as you can observe how individuals perceive your brand, title it’s List, and what other brands they categorize you with.
In Conclusion
Gaining followers is a key metric for many businesses. But getting on lists is more valuable.
And staying on top of the best social news happens when you consistently see Social Fresh articles in your feed. Perhaps, if you haven’t already, considering a List to place @SocialFresh in would serve you well. For that matter, you may even want to add the author of this post to one of your Lists.
Learning, connecting, and educating the concepts of Lists maximizes everyone’s Twitter experience. And your business’s community is only as powerful as the community you bring along for the ride: supporters, employees, investors, enthusiasts, customers, etc. If these individuals are educated and connected, there’s little you can’t accomplish.