Social Media 365 Day 6, Interview: Twitter Lists – How to use them?

Day 6/365 of the Social Media 365 Project ( The day we took our first interview)

Twitter lists has been a feature which was launched very recently and we were wondering ” whether they make any sense?” We are very new to twitter its has just been five days and we are following hardly any people now. We have around 60 people whom we follow and we really didnt see any use of the lists feature we asked the same question to one of our friend, Matt Stenning (@market_maverick ) and he told us that list were immensely helpful for him. Hence we decided to interview him on lists and fortunately for us he readily accepted.

Before we go ahead with the interview we would like to introduce you all to Matt.

Matt Stenning is a 18 year old internet marketer and blogger at http://ssmmarketing.tv/ he has been using Twitter for about 6 months and has generated a following of over 20,000 people. He currently is building his own Twitter monetisation software which is due to be released in the next month.

Here is the interview :

Q: How do you use ” Twitter lists” and how helpful do you find them (Please give us some examples )

Ans: Currently I have created lists for people I know in Sydney (Australia), Perth (Australia) and a list for other marketers that I know, so I can keep up to date with what they are doing. Because I am following over 20,000 people it can be easy to miss alot of tweets, so the people who I find interesting I have put them into a list so I can ensure that I will be able to read their tweets and interact with them. This week i’ll be starting to put together a list of my competitors so I can start to monitor what they are doing, to make sure that my business wont be affected by any changes that they are doing.

Q:Does getting listed signify something, say for example SMMalerts is part of 3 lists, does tht mean something to the new guys who see our profile??

Ans: Its hard to tell if the number of lists you are on means anything to the people looking at your profile. Lists are quite new, but over time I believe that people will look at the number of lists someone is in compared to the number of people follow the account. If you look at @mashable for example, they have over 1 million followers and are listed on over 12,000 lists, does that mean that only 12,000 people who follow mashable want to read their tweets? I don’t think so, I really just think that not enough people understand the power of Twitter Lists at the moment.

Q: We recently heard that some news channels have created lists for live journalism of “Fort hood case” , what else do you think will be the uses of twitter lists

Ans: I love that people are using and creating Twitter Lists to be able to keep up to date with whats happening on the news, and around the world. Twitter is fast becoming the number 1 place for up to date breaking news, but the problem can be when it becomes a Twitter Trend a lot of marketers will start to spam the trend so people who are looking for the real information can’t find it. Personally I think Twitter need to make a search area for lists so you are able to find lists about things you are interested in.

Q:If you dont mind answering, do you think there can be business models built around this feature ?

Ans: At the moment I can’t see a business model behind Twitter Lists, realistically the only real way for Twitter to make $$ is to incorporate a advertising model, but they need to be smart in the way they do it to make sure that people don’t get annoyed with it and start not using Twitter.

These were some questions that we asked Matt on lists. Here are some general questions that we asked Matt on what Twitter means to him: Here we go

Q: What do you think twitter is all about and since how long have you been around ?

Ans: For me Twitter is about a couple of things:
– Number 1 is it’s about conversation, i’d get anything from 50 – 200 @ replies everyday that I personally reply to, it’s the conversation that keeps me tweeting.
– I also use it to promote my website and find new customers, I’m not over the top in my marketing on Twitter, but I do it in a way that people know i’m a marketer and know how to find my site, but I don’t stick it in their face every two second.
– One of the best things about Twitter is that I can network with millions of people that I normally wouldn’t be able to.

Q: Do you think twitter is a good platform for marketing your products or services ? (what suggestions would you give to marketers)

Ans:Twitter is a great place for marketing products or services, but it’s hard to build a relationship with enough trust for someone for them to spend big $$ with you. Your best off trying to sell something that isn’t more then $30, then use your email marketing to up sell them, or give them a free gift and again use your email marketing to up sell and build the relationship.(as a side note, we recently did a free gift promotion on twitter using an account that had 5k followers, it generated about 150 new leads to the business and out of those 150, 89 of them went onto buy a 1k product)

Q: Some people miss out the most important thing on twitter, that is engaging with followers, how important is it? and how do you manage 20k+ followers and end up answering all their queries ?

Ans: As I said before Twitter is all about the conversation, if your not conversing with people on Twitter its just not going to work out. To be honest managing 20k followers isn’t that hard, i’d be getting 200 or so @ replies every day that I reply to, it can take some time to do but, I feel the more personal my account is the more responsive people will be when I send out a marketing message.

Q: Your suggestions to newbies , the do’s and dont’s on twitter

Ans: The biggest thing you need to make sure you do on Twitter is make sure that you be conversational and don’t always promote your product, you need to make sure that you give out information, quotes or just general chatter. Be you, not some automated bot.I generally spend about 30 minutes each morning when I wake up catching up on the @ replies I get while i’m sleeping, then I’ll get some work done and during the day i’ll take a couple of 10 minute breaks just to check my @ replies. At night depending on what conversations I get into I could spend another hour or two chatting to people, but really you only need to spend 30mins in the morning and 30mins at night to be effective on twitter.

Hope you liked our interview. If you have any queries you can leave a comment, we will get it answered by Matt or perhaps you can directly ask your queries to Matt by leaving a @ reply to him. He will definitely be more than happy to answer your queries.

Signing off for today.

Team @SMMalerts

PS: Matt was very easy to work with , he readily agreed for an interview and he replied back very soon also. Thanks mate.