Disclaimer: This post about Twitter List has been inspired by the #SmManners Tweet Chat hosted by Dabney Porte. We had a very interesting hour of information sharing and you can find the transcript here.

Twitter lists have been around for a while now, and I had adopted them early on. But I need to admit that it was never known to me that these lists could be very powerful source of engagement until I had attended the chat.

Twitter Lists

According to Twitter,

“A list is a curated group of Twitter users. You can create your own lists or subscribe to lists created by others”

As most of you know, anyone can create a Twitter list, and these list could be private (visible only to the user) or public (visible to all users). As a Twitter user, you can even subscribe to the public lists of others.

If you’re still thinking on why you should be creating Twitter lists, here are my 5 reasons to tap into them:

1. Getting Organized

You may have seen your Twitter followers increasing and have reached a phase where you’re unable to follow the Twitter stream. If you’re in that phase, time to get organized & create a list to ensure that you do not miss any messages. The lists will help you group the users under a certain name & helps you filter out the noise.

2. Getting SEO Juice

Yes, you heard it right. Twitter lists are SEO friendly. So make sure your keywords are in place when naming the Twitter Group. It’ll help you get more subscribers and enhance your profile.

3. Promotion

Imagine you have a great list where the gurus of your respective domain are listed. Now you can share the list across multiple forums. It would be worthwhile for people to just follow your list instead of looking for these individual & follow them.

4. Maintain Account Size

Sometimes, few of your followers can get overwhelmed by the amount of people you follow and may choose to unfollow you. That’s where the advantage of having users on the Twitter list comes into focus. It allows you to just add a user to the list & choose not to follow them. This helps when you want to maintain the account to certain limit.

There are few rules to creation of the lists though:

1. List name cannot be more than 20 characters

2. List name cannot start with a number

3. Can create maximum 20 lists

4. A list can have maximum 500 users

It might also be interesting to know that the Twitter list names can be SEO friendly. So, if you are someone who wants to leverage the lists for branding purpose, make sure the name is SEO friendly – which means it needs to be loaded with keywords

Since you may have created the list and the next step would be to add users to it. You may want to explore Twitlistmanager, which has been working very well for me to manage the lists.