What is a Twitter list and why should I make one?

What is Formulists and Formulytics?

How can I find new customers on Twitter? 

Some of these questions go back to Twitter basics, all are very important to ask.  To help users and others get quick and clear answers to these questions and more, we have prepared a “how to” and explanation guide on our site to address a number of them. Check it out and let us know what you think.  And if you have you have more questions, just ask!

Who are your new followers? People you just met in real life? New potential friends? Future customers?

It helps to keep an eye on who is following or unfollowing you, so that you don’t miss opportunities to meet great new people and future friends. Learning who your new followers are and when they follow you will help you begin cultivating relationships with the new folks entering your social sphere.

Keep track of who is entering your network

There are a few ways to keep an eye on the new followers you’re getting. One way that you can straight from Twitter or a Twitter client like Hootsuite, is to use an automagically updating list, such as the Formulists “new followers” list, to track new followers. 

Start with “hello”, greet by name where possible

Acknowledgment is nice and on Twitter there are countless ways to do it.  If you are getting tons of new followers all the time, the easiest approach is sending one or a few tweets out that mention and say “hello” to all your new followers at once…

It’s the little things

…Of course, the more personal you can get, the more acknowledged and special you will make your new follower feel. It takes all of about two seconds to learn a person’s name on Twitter, and about five to learn a bit about them.  Just click on their name or display pic on Twitter:

Stay in touch

This is where a list of new followers can help you most. This will help you develop a relationship beyond just an initial greeting and really get to know who your new followers are and what they tweet about.  It will also make it easy for you to notice natural and interesting opportunities for engagement.  Wherever you notice a great idea or link, you can start a dialogue and begin building a relationship.

What other tips do you have for getting to know new followers?

We are super excited to announce that as of today, Formulists will be available from Hootsuite, a leading social media dashboard.
 
Hootsuite is the ultimate command center for managing and measuring your social networks because it allows you to efficiently multi-task from one central location via a number of “streams” of information.

These “streams” in Hootsuite allow you to simultaneously track different audiences of interest, as well as real-time information relevant to your business.  The Formulists app for Hootsuite will give Hootsuite users the added ability to monitor their Twitter communities in some new ways.
 
Discover your top fans
 
A stream of your “top fans” in Hootsuite will quickly identify your top retweeters on Twitter making it easy to acknowledge them and strengthen your relationship with them.

 
 Track new followers and unfollowers
 
A stream of “recent followers” or “recent unfollowers” will allow you to stay up to speed on the new people you’re attracting and also those you are losing.  
 

 
Analyze streams by location, bio or Twitter activity
 
The “Filter Stream” will allow you to take any existing Twitter stream you have and analyze it for location, bio or Twitter activity.  This can be very useful for analyzing your home feed or followers, as well as segmenting your audience for targeted monitoring and engagement.

We would love to hear what you think, so if you are a Hootsuite user (and you should be!), make a Formulists stream today and let us know what you think!

“A hashtag is really just a way of categorizing your tweets so that they are part of a narrowed conversation and they’re easier to find in Twitter search.”  - Lauren Dugan, “Twitter 101: Why Use Hashtags” 

Hashtags are great because they help you target both topics and audiences while giving context to your conversations in social media.  And as a result of using them you can enrich your engagement and extend your reach helping you get more engagement, retweets  and followers.  In other words, when used correctly, hashtags can get you a lot more bang for your buck- or tweet.  

Of course, the key to getting the most value from hashtags involves using them correctly. For example, don’t write a tweet like this:

“Don’t use hashtags excessively #for every #other word or extraneously #cheetos! hoping for traffic from them” - example from The Digital Marketer, “How to Use Hashtags Properly”  

The key is to make sure your hashtags are relevant to the topic of the tweet, understandable to the audience you’re targeting, and not over-used. If you want to read up more on the “Do’s and Don’t of Hashtags” check out a great post on the topic by Sherilynn from The Next Web.

So the question remains, how can you find the hashtags that are most relevant to the topic you’re tweeting about and that will be recognized/searched for most by your target audience?

To help you with this, we have developed a tool in Formulytics that allows you to discover the top trending hashtags for your target audience on Twitter.  Either use an existing list or make one with us (of your followers, experts in your industry, fans, etc) and we will find their top tweeted hashtags from the last two days. For instance, here are the top trending hashtags for the group of tweeps that have been tweeting about #bcwine most:

What’s great about this is that I find out exactly what’s trending with my audience (#BCwine tweeps) and the hashtags they use, will recognize and search for most.  I also learn about festivals going on (#fallwinefest), chats I should get involved in (#winechat) and other interests of my target audience (#Vancouver, #travel, #canucks- no surprise ;)

Give it a try if you’re interested and let us know what you think! You can tweet us any time @formulists or send an email our way to contact [at] formulists [dot] com. Would love to hear from you!

This morning we got a great question from one of our star users, Joel Hughes. Specifically, he was wondering how he could make sure that members from one Twitter list would not also appear on another:

This is a great question, because by making sure that each twitter list has unique members, you also make sure you don’t read the same tweets twice and thus can more efficiently pay attention to unique tweets.

What are some good use cases where this technique would be handy?

• To have a nifty list of people you haven’t talked to in a while 
• To create different priority level lists to read in order to save time

How Do I Do It?

Step 1: Sign into Formulists with your Twitter account

Step 2: Choose to add a “mash” list from the “Lists or Follower Sets They’re Already In” category.

Step 3: In the first line add a list or follower set of interest (ie: people you follow) and in the second add the list whose members you would not want to include in your final list.   Make sure to select “remove people from this list” from the drop down menu on the left like so:

Step 4: Hit “Create List” at the bottom and voila! You should now have a new stream dedicated to people you are following who are not already in another list of yours.

Often times I learn great tips and uses of Formulists from star users themselves.  The past month has been no exception with some really brilliant posts about Formulists and ways to make the most of the service. Below I have summarized and taken quotes from some of these hot tips and provided links to the posts and their authors so that you can get in touch with them and learn more!

Tip: Acknowledge and Get to Know New Followers

One of many awesome tips from @momcommblog’s post

Why? “Marketing.. [is] about GENUINE interactions and building connections”. By taking the time to observe and greet new followers, you help establish a connection that can be strengthened over time.

How? Create a “Track and Greet New Followers” Formulist.  Then “peek at your new list. Reply to someone. Retweet a post. Be helpful in some way. Respond when they ask their followers a question. You don’t have to spend hours doing this. Just a few minutes a day makes a big difference in showing that you’re interested in what people have to say, not just broadcasting your own message.”

Click here to make your own list of recent followers

Tip: Pay Back Generosity

One of several hot tips from @mmangen’s post on @shellykramer’s blog 

Why? “People who regularly RT the content that we share on Twitter…are doing us a huge favor- and paying us a wonderful compliment”. By reciprocating the favor, those RTers will feel acknowledged and special too and be more likely to keep up their supportive efforts.

How? “We use Formulists to automatically create lists of those friends who frequently RT our “stuff” and use those lists to return the favor”

Click here to make your own list of loyal retweeters

Do you find these tips helpful?  Or do you have other really great tips for us?  Please let us know by either commenting here, tweeting us or sending us an email contact@formulists.com. Would love to hear from you!

Comments

       Tweep Cloud of “Vancouver Coffee Keeners” list (how we made it shown below!)

Formulists and its team members hail from one of the biggest coffee-loving cities in North American: Vancouver, Canada.  Which is why if you’re a new and little coffee shop here, there’s older and bigger competition to deal with, namely popular shops like Starbucks, Blenz and JJ Bean.

The silver lining, though, is that with social media you can use the established customer bases to discover new and potentially influential targets.  A very fast, simple and easy way to do this is by using Formulists’ “Custom-Lists” to discover coffee-loving locals.  Just make a list that keeps only people that follow all three of the big coffee shops and then filter for your city, Vancouver.

<and filter for city>

If you would like to get even more fancy, you can also filter for number or ratio of followers (in order to keep only more popular Twitter users in the list) or by bio keywords.  

Extra Cool Tip: You can also make lists of people who are following at least X out of as many as 20 different lists or follower sets.  Just “add people” from all the lists together and then hit the “custom-list” options tab and change the number for “minimum list appearances” to be X.  For instance, if X =10 and you are adding the followers of 20 different competitors together, then your list will be people who are following at least 10 out of 20 of your competitors.