5 Uncommon Ways to Use Twitter Lists for Effective Content Ideation

Staying on top of industry news and knowing what’s important to your customers is a crucial part of B2B marketing and the key to meaningful content production. If you’re like us, you probably find yourself drowning in a deluge of news bits, helpful tips, blog posts to keep up with and more. Twitter is an especially chaotic place to hang out — it’s supposed to help you parse through the shitstorm of content whirling around, but sometimes it seems like you can scroll and scroll down your newsfeed for days and still see Tweets that some bot posted one minute ago.

This can lead to some serious content fatigue, and the glazed eyes and mindless scroll that accompany it are not the hallmarks of the engaged writer, harvesting valuable ideas. That’s where Twitter lists can come in handy, but is anyone using these lists for better content ideation? Not really…until now.

What Are Twitter Lists?

If you’re on top of your content game, you are already using Twitter in your B2B marketing strategy. But if you’re following hundreds or thousands of people, brands and organizations, you need a logical way to organize all this information and filter out some of the noise. Lists let you organize accounts into specific categories or topics. You can create your own lists or subscribe to other users’ lists.

According to the B2B Content Marketing report from Content Marketing Institute, 88% of B2B Marketing marketers say they use Twitter primarily as a means of distributing content. Aside from getting your feed organized, there (at least) five effective ways to use Twitter lists to help generate powerful ideas, specifically for your industry.

Access the Most Relevant Content

Following some of the most reputable and established lists, like this Marketing List by Mashable, or this list of influencers by Cision means that you can click directly to a wonderfully curated list of info by some of the industry’s leading thinkers. Keep an eye out for users who are sharing the same content that you are and reach out to fellow industry experts.

Track Your Biggest Fans & Customers

You can create your own list of your biggest fans and supporters, which allows you to see what they are sharing and what they care about. This helps you paint a better picture of your target audience and continue to provide them with content that is meaningful to them. What news topics perk their interest? What publications do they read? Is the underlying tone serious or funny? Answer the questions these people ask.

Ever wonder which of your followers has the most social authority so you can take a few cues from them? Good news. Oz just made a free tool that lets you rank your followers and see who is most followed. You can also use this version of the tool to see how the people you follow rank. Check it out and let us know what you think

Tracking themes that your followers have been tweeting about is another way to understand their likes and dislikes. Take a general assessment of the topics they tweet about: is it action movies, parenting, or latest tech news? Building content that reflect these interests will certainly get their attention.

Watch Your Competitors

Keeping an eye on your competitors is one of the best ways to stay ahead of the content marketing game. You can make a private list of the companies you want to watch so they won’t even know you’re following them. You can also use tools like TrackMaven and LittleBird for help with this; find out what sort of content they been producing and strategize about the key industry concepts that have not been talked about. Then do it.

Don’t Forget the Curators

Sometimes it’s curators, not industry leaders, who are compiling the very best stuff on Twitter — these are the ones who dig and probe for hidden gems that the experts might not be posting. Use a service like Muck Rack to track down some of the best curators and trending creatives.

Keep Up with Colleagues

Create a list of your colleagues to help keep your branding tight. You can stay aware of your co-workers social media presence by making this list private and using it as a way to communicate with your whole team at once.

Twitter Lists aren’t perfect, but they do help to make the chaos of content in your feed a little more manageable. Regularly checking in on the lists you’ve created is a great way to stay on top of trending info and relevant content and it will probably give you some great stuff to retweet: it’ll make it easy to keep up with your industry via twitter, and if you follow the right mix of influencers and customers, you’ll find yourself flush with content for effective idea generation.

Originally published at ozcontent.com on August 19, 2015.