Twitter has grown by leaps and bounds. And the world’s leading microblogging social network is getting more business-friendlier than ever, it launched a revamped online business center a little while ago. Despite the phenomenal popularity of Twitter, certain features such as “Lists” are grossly underused, especially amongst the business user fraternity.

Twitter lists feature has been around since November 2009 and it lets users create groups to organize their feeds. While it may sound trivial, it’s actually a much-desired feature for several business users as it helps them streamline their contacts and day-to-day activities in Tweetverse.

This post guides you through the process of generating a responsive Twitter list for your business.

Why List Building is important?

Twitter, like any other social network, thrives on the community building aspect. As a business, you’d often like to segregate your Twitter followers into various communities e.g. partners, clients, customers and other followers. Twitter provides you a finer level of access control for you to your followers using the “List” feature.

Creating lists is as easy as 1-2-3!

I often feel that lists have never really received their due attention on Twitter. Log in to Twitter, access the “Lists” heading and choose the “New List” link. Enter a name, description, access control settings – private/ public and then start adding users by navigating to their profiles and using the “Manage Lists” link.

While creating lists is easy, a list with non-targeted audience is of little use to a business. Therefore, I strongly emphasize that businesses spend time selecting a “quality” audience rather than “quantity” for generating meaningful twitter lists.

Tapping your LinkedIn Connections for Lists

It’s fair to say that last year was the year of convergence in social media space. LinkedIn introduced a “Tweets” application which lets users find and keep track of their contacts on both Twitter and LinkedIn. The ability to save your LinkedIn contacts as a dynamic Twitter list is one of the most popular features of Tweets.

The best part about these Twitter lists is that they are always kept up-to-date automatically, by adding and removing Twitter accounts to the list daily based on your LinkedIn connections.

Responsive Lists

Building a Twitter list is easy. However, the challenging part is to ensure maximum follower participation on your lists. From a business perspective, this is all the more important as dead lists would do no good to your brand’s image.

Once you have the list audience finalized, start talking to them and make it a point to communicate meaningfully on a regular basis. When your followers respond, you gain more traction in the Twitter world as their followers come across your profile.

Encourage your followers to contribute regularly to the list and keep it alive and kicking. A list is all about a dialogue and that’s what your business needs.

As a business user, have you used the Twitter list feature recently? If so, how are you leveraging it for business gains? Please share your opinion by leaving a comment below this post.