Idea Hall Blog Segment Your Followers with Twitter Lists
11/10/09Twitter recently unveiled “Twitter Lists,” a new feature still in the testing phase that allows users to segment their followers by audience type. We noticed a few immediate benefits that should improve the overall effectiveness of Twitter as a marketing medium.
The most notable benefit comes from the ability to sort and prioritize target audiences according to specific criteria such as location, industry, interest, age and other attributes. This enhancement helps to turn a static list of followers into an intuitive and strategically segmented database of useful information.
Secondly, Twitter has inked deals with Bing and Google to make tweets more searchable by geography. For example, someone searching for a brand in Los Angeles may be served Tweets specific to the city, in addition to information about the company and its products.
We also observed a few limitations. Most notably, you cannot send “bulk-Tweets” to members of a given list or allow your Tweets to be visible exclusively to those members. If and when these limitations are addressed, Twitter will have to undertake measures to protect user privacy and counter spamming.
Over the past year, we’ve seen Twitter change dramatically from a burgeoning social media outlet into one of the most widely used marketing vehicles in the world. We’ve even discussed in this social space how industry leaders are already using Twitter to strengthen their bottom line. The need for continued upgrades on reliability and functionality still remain, however, these upgrades will change the way marketers use the medium…and hopefully for the better.
