Lauren Cochrane has a great post today with ideas for lists organizations could create with Twitter’s new List function. If you haven’t heard about Lists yet, you’re not behind! They have only been rolled out to around half of the users so far. You can read more about Lists on the Twitter Blog here.
Lauren outlines 7 Lists that organizations may find useful, including:
- Your organisation’s chapters and campaigns.
- Related international organisations and campaigns.
- Organisations that are somewhat related to your organisation.
- Celebrities, politicians and others with a high profile.
- Media.
- Volunteers.
- Retweeters and people who have contacted you.
As I added to Lauren’s post in the comments, I think there’s a lot of opportunity for organizations to leverage the List functionality for boosting visibility of their work and finding new supporters. Think about the way Facebook Fan pages work, the way we see when others add a Fan page and we may join as well, and so on. This kind of visibility work taps people’s desire to be cause-related in self identity.
Here’s my idea for an organizational visibility campaign using Lists:
Create a list for Supporters. (Make sure it’s a public list, and link to it from your website and elsewhere.) Encourage people who want to be included on that list to publicly @reply to you and say why they support you. Then, add them to the list.
So, they’ve already publicly promoted you to their whole followers list and as a member of the list can feel a bit more connected with the organization (to retweet messages in the future, help promote campaigns or other projects, etc.).
What do you think?
Would love to hear if you have other ideas about using Lists for organizations. Do you already have the Lists function enabled on your account – have you used it yet?
I love your Supporters List idea – particularly because you are eliciting reasons why people support your organisation. It’s a great way for people to share why they feel aligned to your organisation (potentially helping you to gain more Twitter followers) and it can provide some great insight that could be used for future outreach or campaign efforts.
Thanks so much for sharing my post with your network!
Thanks, Lauren! I think it could be, as you say, a way to gain more followers, but also a way to hear from your supporters what programs or projects are attracting people – an opportunity for some direct feedback and insight. And, it could be a great way to get some relevant quotes about your work to use on your website etc.
Thanks for the relevant post this morning that I could share!
I made a Community Foundations list (http://twitter.com/Elisa_Hebert/community-foundations)… and found a few great ones that other people have made. For me, that’s the unexpected nugget of awesomeness – being able to share lists and the opportunity for encountering new folks that comes along with other folks’ lists.
This is a fantastic NonProfit Tech list by @rjleaman made: http://twitter.com/rjleaman/nonprofit-technology
Thanks for joining in, Elisa!
I agree that the List tools holds some potential for even more networking on Twitter – instead of people needing to catch the hashtag or find conversations in the moment, we can uses Lists to group together in longer-term ways.
I just came across this post: “Why Twitter ‘Lists’ Change Everything (http://davetroy.com/?p=644/). More food for thought!
Thanks again for adding the links for other readers.
Hey Amy really helpful post thanks for taking the time to put this together.
Had an issue today with a Twitter list you might like to take a read
would welcome your thoughts on the Etiquette issue http://bit.ly/obiZ1
John
Great ideas, Amy. The possibilities to leverage this tool for NFP’s are endless. I can’t wait to see what some of the more creative groups do with this.
Hi John-
Thanks for joining the conversation here. Thanks also for sharing the link to your post about how to remove yourself from Lists! I think that Twitter has proven it develops all functionality based on user/crowd input. Lists aren’t even enabled for all users yet but I’m sure that they’ve already run into a lot of feedback like yours that users will want to be able to remove themselves from lists others put them on. Perhaps there will be a simple “remove me” option in the near future.
Thanks again
Hi Carol-Anne – I complete agree! It will be a fun time to watch how different groups and organizations use the new functionality as well as the to use or not to use debate!
Thanks for joining in 🙂
This is great! Thanks Elisa for the Community Foundations list – I’m already following 🙂 What a neat way to “venn-diagram” our networks and see where interests intersect. Great tip on asking for an @reply to get active tweeps on your lists.
Thanks, Luise –
Glad you found the Community Foundations list helpful! Now I can’t stop looking for great lists that others have created! 🙂
Thanks for joining in!