Healthy Twitter Lists

Going through some old posts on my (seemingly defunct) personal blog for street cred on the topic, I was reminded how much I really liked Twitter lists and niches, as I’ve been rekindling that old flame lately. What I’m enjoying about Twitter lists these days is how far they’ve come toward serving as an all in one pseudo-relationship management tool.

Two Things That Twitter And Lists Make Easy

research Let’s say that you want to find everybody on Twitter related to a specific health condition… and associated niches. My example would be “mental health” but within that general topic there are associated keywords by condition: depression bipolar, etc. by profession: psychiatrist, social worker, etc. and by affiliation: patient, pharma, etc. to name a few, so try not to limit yourself in your searches. There are three ways that I use to go about finding these different people on Twitter within a condition topic of interest. You can search their Twitter bios for key words by using a free service like followerwonk. You can search for keywords that people have associated themselves with in online directories, like WeFollow. Or you can troll other peoples’ lists by keyword using a free service like TLists.  Sidenote: I do recommend some human intervention after you get the initial results, however. Looking at these user accounts will reveal SPAMMERS as well as inactives, neither of which you want on your list. Plus manually reviewing the results begins to get you familiar with the faces of your condition on Twitter.

communication Once you have your topical lists created you can throw them into Tweetdeck to monitor what people in your niche are talking about and join in the conversation when you have something to add. If you have a message that you want to make sure that certain list members see, you can log into Twitter.com, open your list and the list’s followers, click on every individual list member, and look for the “Message” button in their profile. This may sound tedious, but it’s actually a lot easier than attempting to contact people from spreadsheets. It’s an easy way to connect with people you have deemed to be important, in private. Presumably, a percentage of the people you reach out to will reply or retweet your message. So as an extra bonus, you can create a new private list of those people to put into Tweetdeck so you can build on those connections over time.

How are you using Twitter lists to connect with other health professionals?

photo by the Italian Voice