How to use Lists to mon­i­tor your per­sonal & pro­fes­sional brands

There’s been a lot of talk about Twit­ter Lists. How do you use them? How can they be improved? What is Twit­ter hop­ing to do with them … down the road? Not to men­tion the many posts on how point­less or awe­some they are. Gotta love the Twit­ter buzz.

Well, I’m going to take a step back and focus on an actual use I’ve found for the new addi­tion to our Twit­ter bag-of-tricks. Over the past few weeks I’ve started using the lists func­tion in my online rep­u­ta­tion man­age­ment (ORM) endeav­ors. For those of you not that famil­iar with ORM and its many awe­some faces, let me share with you a few things.

First, you should all have some sort of auto­mated ORM process. At the very least, this would include Google Alerts set up on your name and/or your company’s brand. In addi­tion, I would sug­gest going a bit fur­ther and data-mining Twit­ter Search for any men­tions — man­u­ally, at the very least. A strong ORM plan should be the foun­da­tion to any time spent online.

If you aren’t search­ing out men­tions of you and your prod­ucts, then how are you choos­ing where to spend your time? How do you know where you should put your efforts into when grow­ing and opti­miz­ing? Exactly, you don’t.

So on that note, let’s talk Twit­ter Lists and how you can use them to gain clar­ity into how you are pre­sent­ing your­self and, even more impor­tantly, how you are being received by your fol­low­ers on Twitter.

Who are you to them?
You should be check­ing what lists peo­ple are adding you to. Are you pre­sent­ing your­self in the right man­ner? Do you see the cor­rect adjec­tives and titles being asso­ci­ated to you? If not, you might want to con­sider work­ing on those sec­tors. This may include push­ing out blog posts or tweets around the sub­ject you really want to be aligned with.

Who are you being placed with?
Check those lists and see what other peo­ple are included. This helps you gauge where your fol­low­ers see you as far as exper­tise goes. This can help with your branded accounts, too. Are you falling in line with your com­peti­tors? Are some of your com­peti­tors miss­ing from a list you are on? This is a great com­peti­tor spy­ing tool as well as per­sonal mon­i­tor­ing tactic.

Twit­ter is a funny thing because you can lit­er­ally “estab­lish” your­self in far­away places — both cities and even dif­fer­ent coun­tries. Take the time to check out which geo­graph­i­cally cen­tered lists you make. This works great for brands with mul­ti­ple offices — you can track which offices need to increase local brand aware­ness and push rep­re­sen­ta­tion accordingly.

Are you doing it right?
This may seem a bit vague, but this is what it all really comes down to. We all know the poten­tial that Twit­ter holds in estab­lish­ing both per­sonal and branded per­sonas. How­ever, often the lines blur and brands are too infor­mal, with per­sonal accounts being too dry. Check the lists you are on and see if your per­sonal account is also added to fun lists like peo­pleIlove­toread or cool­cats. Rec­i­p­ro­cally, double-check that your branded account hasn’t made a list called ridiculoustweets.

These are just a few ways to use Twit­ter Lists to make sure you are tweet­ing for opti­mal return. Online rep­u­ta­tion man­age­ment is more cru­cial now than ever before. With so much of what we push online find­ing new ways to go viral, let’s make sure we are still in con­trol of where the spot­light lands. Track­ing Twit­ter Lists is a great addi­tion to any ORM rou­tine. Rock on, Twit­ter. Keep the func­tions com­ing, and we will keep find­ing ways to use them to our advan­tage. #awe­some­nessJoanna Lord is a social mar­ket­ing con­sul­tant and founder of Your­Job­Stop, the job resources board. See her busi­ness pro­file, con­tact Joanna or leave a com­ment below.

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