When I hosted the recorded webinar last week on How to Use Twitter Lists & Directories to Promote Your Expertise and Build Your Brand, I encouraged participants to get onto as many Twitter lists as possible because lists are a powerful form of free advertising.
One of my suggestions was to write a blog post telling readers the types of lists where you’d be a perfect fit, and then suggesting that they add you to existing lists on those topics, or create new ones.
But before you do that, it’s helpful to first find out how people on Twitter perceive you. This will give you other ideas to add to the list of topics on which you’re an expert, and some of them might surprise you. The instructions below are included on the handouts from last week’s webinar, and the entire package is available here.
To see whose lists you’re on:
- Log into your Twitter account
- Go to your Home page
- Look in the upper right corner, near your gravatar, for the word “Listed.” It will tell you how many lists you’re on.
- Click on it. You’ll see all the names of the lists and the gravatars of the people who created them. The names of the lists will be in bold.
Scan the list and you should start to see a pattern. The screenshot above shows some of the 668 lists I’m on. Many of the lists are devoted to PR, publicity, marketing communications, book marketing and social media.
Now that you have a good idea how you’re perceived, write a blog post like this one, suggesting that your Twitter followers add you to their lists on certain topics.
Add Me to These Lists
Here are topics for other lists you can consider adding me to, based on many of the other lists on which I appear:
Writing or Writers
Editing or Editors
Journalists or Journalism
Marketing
Authors
Business Women
Small Business
Online Marketing
Digital Marketing
Self-promotion
Shoestring Marketing
Book Publicity
Resources for Authors
Inspiring Quotes
Humor
Entrepreneurs
Advertising/Marketing
PR Pros
Press Releases
Blogging or Bloggers
Dog Jokes (I include a dog joke in each issue of The Publicity Hound’s Tips of the Week, my free weekly ezine, and often share it on Twitter)
Other Ways to be Included on Twitter Lists
1. Tweet helpful, relevant content frequently and forego the “here’s what I’m doing today” tweets. Help people solve their problems!
2. Add yourself to your own lists if you’re a perfect fit. Remember that other people will be subscribing to your lists. If you’re a small business expert, for example, and somebody is following your list of small business experts, you want to be on it.
3. Include a short blurb in your email signature suggesting that people add you to their lists, with a link to your Twitter page.
4. Ask! Don’t be shy about suggesting that people add you to a particular list they’ve created. They might be grateful that you’ve helped them grow their lists.
Be sure to reciprocate. Welcome requests from other people who ask you to put them on your lists.
What other ways do you use Twitter lists? Is there anything about lists that you don’t understand? Sharre your own tips here on how to get onto other people’s lists.
The Publicity Hound
Everything you do online—good and bad—is publicity
By Phyllis Zimbler Miller
Guest Blogger
The basics: Correct spelling and good grammar
Yes, on Twitter I’ve been known to use 4 to mean “for” when I don’t have enough characters for what I want to say. But I always strive to spell correctly every real word I use.
And while some people might say “What’s the big deal?” about incorrectly spelled words, some people who read your tweets might think you’re careless with other things too, such as their business needs if they were your clients.
Off-limits: Swear words, off-color comments and slang
I personally was taken aback when a person for whom I was about to write a guest post called me “mate” in an email. In my perception, “mate” has a very particular meaning, and it’s not that positive. I nicely pointed out to him that I was rather surprised by the use of the term.
It’s not only what you write online – it’s also what you say online
Let’s say you’re on a teleseminar and you ask a question in which you unnecessarily disparage someone or something. Then that teleseminar recording is made available to the people on the teleseminar as well as others. It’s possible that what you said could get you in deep water for a very long time. And how do you apologize to a recording?
What if you disagree with something that someone has said?
Again, it’s important to consider how to disagree before you blast your opinion throughout the Internet. I faced this issue when someone responded to a LinkedIn question with what I believed was totally inaccurate information. I didn’t want to say the answer was wrong but I didn’t want to leave the person asking the question with the opinion that the given answer was correct.
I posed my dilemma as a blog post on my site, and I received a very wise response. I was advised to say: “There are differing opinions on this subject.” And then I was to give my opinion without referring to the other person’s answer.
I thought this an extremely reasonable strategy. I did not “put down” the other person’s answer, but I did share my own opinion with the person who asked the question.
And this advice definitely includes the photos you post. For example, whether you believe in Facebook’s privacy settings (which are changed, it seems, almost on a daily basis), do NOT post a picture of yourself holding a bottle of beer in each hand and looking the worse for wear. Of course, this advice is even more so for videos on YouTube.
Regardless of whether you think such photos or videos are in “good fun,” your brand or business does not need to take hits from such missteps on your part.
The Internet world is global by definition, and because we can’t know the sensibilities of everyone who might read our tweets, blog comments, etc., we need to be sensitive to the words we use.