Twitter has become a core application in a public relations practitioner’s toolbox. It can be one of the most effective ways to build relationships with key influencers.
One of Twitter’s biggest challenges for a user is focussing on the people and conversations that matter. As you start to follow accounts for different reasons things can get noisy. This is a real problem when you’re trying to ensure your engagement is aligned to a specific objective.
Lists are a tool within Twitter that can help you address this problem. Identify a group that you want to focus on - a particular community, key journalists or influencers - then create a list of accounts that relate to this group.
Having a list that is clearly aligned with your engagement objectives has significant benefits including:
- Identify the members with whom you have existing relationships.
- Understand the content that’s generating conversation.
- Spot the best opportunities to retweet, quote or reply to tweets by list members.
Creating a list
You can create a Twitter list yourself or subscribe to one created by someone else. Limits are not an issue as you can create up to 1,000 lists, each with a maximum of 5,000 accounts.
The quickest way to start following a list is to subscribe to a public list created by someone else. Google can help here - search for “site:twitter.com “term” list”.
This does save time, but as we’ll see you're wholly reliant on a third party for its membership and existence. If you want a list for a work purpose it's definitely preferable to create one yourself.
Adding accounts to a list is a simple case of selecting the user and the list you want to add them to.
If you want to create a list that includes hundreds of accounts, then adding them one by one can be time consuming. Social listening platforms, influencer tools and media databases can help you identify list candidates. Some of them (including our own Lissted application) can also export a full list into Twitter in one simple step.
Once created, you can access lists via the desktop and mobile Twitter apps, as well as engagement tools like Hootsuite and Tweetdeck.
Twitter list features
Lists allow you to view the list members’ tweets without the need to follow them from your account. This can be helpful in the early stages of building relationships when you may not be ready to introduce yourself yet by following someone.
Lists can also be public or private, and this status has a significant impact on how they can be used.
When deciding whether to make your list public or private consider factors such as:
- Is notifying list members of their inclusion a good way of introducing yourself?
- Are you happy for everyone to know that this is a group you're interested in?
- Does anyone else need to be able to use the list who doesn’t have access to your Twitter account?
In many professional outreach situations this assessment will result in choosing private status.
Even if you think that it will ultimately be beneficial to make it public, initially defaulting to private allows you to be happy with its membership before broadcasting to those on the list.
List curated search and monitoring
Lists are great at filtering out the noise, but checking the tweetstream for even a targeted list can still be time consuming. My chapter in the first #PRStack ebook highlighted using Twitter lists created in our Lissted application with the Nuzzel reader app.
Help is also at hand with a simple hack of Twitter’s search feature. In the Twitter search field enter “list:username/list keyword string”. Using this command will find you the tweets that mention your keywords, but only by members of the list in question. You can use this filter for your own private lists and any public list.
Here’s an example where I’m searching for mentions of “PR OR public relations” by Lissted’s public UK Public Relations list.
Bookmark the unique URL relating to the search to quickly access the results at any time.
You can go one step further and create an IFTTT recipe to email you when a new result for that search appears. You now have a powerful curated monitoring system. IFTTT Twitter search recipes are limited to 15 results each time they run so be careful to ensure that the search in question is highly targeted.
Hootsuite and Tweetdeck filtered columns
You can achieve the same result in tools like Hootsuite and Tweetdeck. Create a column that’s populated by a Twitter list and then filter by your keyword string.
