THINKing

8 Ways To Use Twitter Lists

UPDATE: We just launched our Fortune 100 Twitter list. Feel free to follow it or any of our lists mentioned below.

We talked recently about the Twitter lists set up by My Creative Team. Are you using Twitter lists? Tell us about it.

We now have a Twittering Media Outlet List, a Twittering US Journalist List, and a Twittering Canadian Journalist List. Because Hootsuite - our favorite Twitter appliance - now allows you to import your lists, we also set up a Social Media List of our favorites in that category.

We have found a number of ways to utilize Twitter lists. Let’s take a couple of minutes to think about the how-tos of lists.

1. Experts. We established our social media list for the purpose of following experts in this milieu.

2. Social media monitoring. There’s a good piece on this at Fresh Networks‘ blog.

3. Industry news monitoring. We have set up the Twittering Media Outlets list to keep up with breaking news. You also could set up niche news monitoring lists, as we are going to do for our client, Camstar Systems, so we can keep up-to-date on topics such as manufacturing execution and quality management.

4. Employees. A number of businesses, ranging from Mashable to the New York Times, have set up employee lists. This could be a good customer service tool for your company, particularly if you work for a Fortune 1000 size firm.

5. Promote Causes. NonProfit Tech 2.0 has a post about how to use Twitter lists for promoting non-profits and causes.

6. Geo-Specific Lists. My Creative Team has been listed in a number of Charlotte, NC-area Twitter lists, like this one. This is a good way to keep up with what’s happening where you live, or where you used to live.

7. News Sources. Poynter Online has a solid post telling journalists how to use Twitter lists to help streamline their jobs.  Mashable also has a piece on how journalists are using Twitter lists.

8. Job Search.  Looking for a job? Set up a list of companies for which you would like to work, so you can get a sense of the corporate culture. Add executive search contacts to the list so you can discover what jobs are available.

Those are just a few ways to use Twitter lists. Got other ideas?

Oh, before you set up your own list, there may already be one out there. Check Listorious, the directory of Twitter lists.   Here’s one we found about job searches.