The issue is that with people tweeting so much how do you keep on top of everything without spending hours of your working day desperately trying to filter it and make sense of it all?  How do you make sure you read the tweets that matter and briefly browse past those that don’t?

There are many different answers and methods of addressing this issue and today we are going to explore just one of these; the use of lists to segment and target others on Twitter.

If you are following say 400, 500 people it is quite plausible that you will be getting tweets onto your newsfeed every few minutes.  This can be information overload for the best of people so it is important that you filter this information down in order to maximise the value of your time and zone out the ‘white noise’.

The key is to make sure you are focussing on the people that matter.  Deciding on just who matters will depend on what you want to gain in line with wider marketing and business development goals but segmentation of the people you are following is vital.

Twitter has the option to have up to 20 lists.  These allow you the opportunity to place accounts that you select into lists and in doing so begin to segment the information you are seeing.

For example, if you are targeting businesses that are in the food and drink industry in Cornwall then create your list, add the Twitter accounts of these businesses into a list and you’ll have a feed for only that area.  You will then be able to re-tweet, respond and interact with those businesses without having to sift through thousands of other unrelated tweets.

The same would go for your own customers.  If you wanted to keep up with their developments, perhaps re-tweet and promote their products then you could have these in a separate list.

There is the option to make these lists ‘private’.  This means that those that are in a list will not know how you are segmenting Twitter users.  You can also add people you are not following into a list.  This can be particularly handy if you want to keep abreast of your competitor’s activity without the need for following them.

A key aspect of marketing is segmentation and this is no different with your Twitter account.  Establishing how you segment users in order to meet your wider marketing efforts will reduce the time you spend and make it that much more valuable.

For more information on our Twitter training and how we can improve your social media performance please give us a call or email hello@mihidigital.co.uk