I attended a great conference yesterday hosted by BDI that featured case studies from various businesses using Social Media.  This was my fourth BDI conference, and recommend that anyone who has an interest in Social Media attend future ones.  My only issue with the conference was the overkill of “Social Media and ROI”.  A typical conversation between two people pertaining to this went something like this:

Person 1: “You need to justify Social Media by showing ROI”

Person 2: “Ok, but how do you do that?”

Person 1: “I don’t know, but it’s important”

Remember when direct mailing, television, and radio were the dominant marketing methods? Businesses would typically utilize these media to increase brand awareness and ultimately increase sales.  How was ROI tracked for these businesses? Granted a lot of companies used coupon codes or different phone numbers to track campaigns, but were these effective in seeing full ROI?  Businesses in the past were willing to spend $100,000 on a few television spots without having a clue on what the outcome was.  Sure they might have seen an increase in sales and/or call volume, but could have it been from word of mouth or another marketing effort?

What has changed then? The Google Effect.  Google Analytics brought online revenue tracking into the mainstream.  If you installed E-Commerce tracking and a couple of snippets of code, you can effectively see where each of your sales came from online.  This proved extremely effective in analyzing ROI for your SEO and paid search campaigns.  Back when print and television advertising was in its prime, it was impossible to measure ROI like this so advertisers weren’t held accountable for it nearly as much.

Social Media (at least the  phrase anyway) came after SEO and paid search. When Social Media started to blow up in its popularity, marketers were already used to being able to measure ROI for their SEM campaigns.  Because this was possible, it had to be as well for Social Media right? Companies have been trying to show the ROI of Social Media through programs, formulas, custom coupon codes, tracking codes; even by assigning dollar values to Facebook fans and Twitter followers.  Nobody has been successful in fully tracking Social Media’s ROI.  Why? Because it’s impossible. Assuming that you can fully track Social Media’s ROI is like assuming that when you tweet a link to your company’s website that everybody who discovers your website through Twitter will always click on that link when they purchase a product from you.

I’ve listed below a couple of benefits of Social Media that cannot be tracked in terms of ROI. It’s impossible, yet there is no arguing that these are all important parts of any Social Media campaign.

• Resolving Consumer Complaints: Twitter, Facebook, forums, blogs, and countless other Social Media sites make it easy for unsatisfied customers to voice their complaints.  Since these complaints are public, businesses benefit the most from responding to these complaints publicly as well. When a company is successful in satisfying the complainer, it not only helps with their brand image, but might turn that “I’m never buying from you again” consumer to a repeat customer.   Unless you command that person to give you a heads up every time they buy from you again (which is just awkward), you cannot track the ROI of resolving consumer complaints.  Yet there is no arguing that these is a crucial part in any Social Media campaign. Ignoring these individuals is almost a guarantee that they’ll never buy from you again.

• Buying Behavior: Say, for example, that you discovered the clothing store “American Eagle” because you saw a Facebook contest they were launching.  Imagine that after you researched their website you end up becoming a frequent customer of theirs.  Every purchase (online anyway) that comes from you should show in e-commerce tracking as from Facebook right? Well, it doesn’t.   It wouldn’t make sense for you to click on their Facebook link every time you went to purchase product from them. Chances are you either typed in the direct URL or searched for the company name on Google, Bing, or Yahoo.  Facebook doesn’t receive credit for all of these sales even though they were responsible for turning you into a regular customer. The same goes for some first time purchases as well. People, by nature, will research more than one company to find the best price / value for whatever type of product they are looking for.  They might discover your website through Social Media and decide to buy from you after doing additional research, but the purchase might come from typing in the URL directly upon their second visit to your website.  Again, Social Media is responsible for the purchase, but will not receive credit for it (according to e-commerce tracking anyway).

• Brand Image: Social Media can be an effective strategy in shifting the image of your brand.  How you communicate as a brand on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, forums, etc. will reflect how consumers view perceive your brand (especially if you are reaching individuals on a wide scale).  If you effectively shift people’s perceptions of your brand to reflect that of the company’s goals, it is a definitely Social Media success, albeit one that is not trackable from an ROI standpoint. Remember when Jet Blue had that fiasco in February 0f 2007 at JFK airport when they kept people on planes for hours without taking off anywhere due to weather conditions? People went from associating Jet Blue with being a “cool airline” to one that didn’t know what they were doing by that one incident alone. Thousands of people swore they would never fly Jet Blue again because they apparently didn’t care about their customers. JetBlue used Social Media to create videos, blogs, tweets, etc. to illustrate why the incident occurred, why it won’t happen again, and why you should still remain a customer of theirs. It was effective in counteracting these negative associations with JetBlue’s brand, but if you were to ask JetBlue what the ROI was of this Social Media campaign they would not be able to tell you. However, they would say with 100% certainty that Social Media was crucial in shifting their brand image and keeping (and generating) customers.

These are only three examples, but it clearly shows that holding  a Social Media campaign accountable by its ROI performance doesn’t make much sense.   However, it’s important to show the value that your Social Media efforts have produced.  Value is a must for any marketing campaign even if it’s not ROI-based.  Below I’ve listed some metrics that could help guide you on assessing whether your Social Media campaign has been effective.

Branded Search Volume: Google has a tool online that allows you to measure monthly search volume for any keyword phrase.  An increase in search volume represents an increase in brand awareness.  If this is seeing a regular increase then you can fairly assess that your marketing efforts (Social Media and additional strategies) have been effective in building your brand.

Engagement Levels: I can buy a 100,000 Twitter followers and Facebook likes in a short period of time if I wanted to. I compare the value in this to buying traffic to a website using programs like Monster Pops that produce a 99.9999% bounce rate.  Twitter followers and Facebook likes are important to measure if you are growing your accounts by natural methods, but to truly see the value of these networks you need to look at engagement levels. Engagement refers to any interaction that takes places through your Social Media channels. This could be a retweet, reply, like, comment, etc.  If this metric continues to increase, it shows that people are becoming increasingly engaged with your brand which is extremely valuable from a branding perspective.  When analyzing this metric, it is important to weed out any spam comments or messages as they skew numbers.

Total Website Traffic: Analyzing traffic from Twitter, Facebook, etc. is useful, but doesn’t paint the full picture. Similar to the “buying behavior” bullet point I mentioned earlier, someone might discover a website through Social Media but will likely visit the website in the future via search or directly typing in the URL.  Because of this, site traffic should be analyzed as a whole instead of solely by referring traffic. However, if you are launching a blog it is important to analyze your blog traffic separately each month.

Value Added Benefits: These are benefits from Social Media that you simply can’t put into numbers. Was there a lot of negative complaints online that you resolved successfully through Social Media? Did somebody who is an influencer in the space positively mention your brand? Did you successful get your product listed on a bunch of blog posts via blog outreach? If Social Media has been providing noticeable value in these areas (and in others) it’s difficult to argue the benefit of it.

Impressions: Analyze impressions for all of your video and image content to see how many eyeballs you’ve successfully reached. These numbers will not be reflected in your analytics stats so it is imperative to keep track of these numbers regularly.

Again, as with any marketing campaign, you need to justify its worth, but when it comes to Social Media judging it by ROI will ultimately set you up for failure.

Without eyeballs, all internet marketing campaigns are doomed to fail.  It’s the number of eyeballs that the search engines use to create the most influential reporting metric, impressions.  This is a term that most people often don’t pay any attention to in the online marketing world.  Impressions are the foundation and backbone of every online marketing campaign.  Clicks and conversions are both related to impressions, because without impressions, any campaign will have zero clicks and zero conversions.

What exactly is an impression in Google?  Using a proprietary algorithm, Google offers all advertisers an inventory of available impressions which is based on keywords and groups of keywords searched for on Google.com.  Google then executes its algorithm in order to show the most relative advertisers and websites to that particular user who provides the eyeballs, which is then added to the total inventory in Google.   Google has created a metric based on this available inventory, it’s called Impression Share.  Their definition of impression share is “the percentage of impressions where your ads were shown out of the TOTAL available impressions in the market you were targeting.”

Impression Share is a great method to use in finding campaigns that are not converting very well due to a variety of reasons.  The information retrieved on these impression share reports can help describe what problems exist in a search campaign.  The report also details percentage of exact keyword matches, percentage of missed opportunities due to low rank (low average positions), and lost opportunities because of not enough budget.  All of these metrics can help diagnose an important problem in most paid search campaigns, QUALITY!  Low quality keywords, low quality creatives, and low quality bid management strategies, are important problems that once discovered will help improve the performance of a campaign.

There are many solutions to the lost impression share problem.  Some of those solutions include adding in the additional match types of converting keywords.  New match types, such as phrase and exact match, is one of the best methods of increasing impression share for a campaign.  Other solutions include increasing max bids for converting keywords and raising daily budgets of high volume campaigns.  Running an impression share report and understanding it value, is a great report for not only helping to improve a campaigns performance, but also gain additional market share in the Google sponsored ad space.

Many “Twitter Experts” have different theories when it comes to following people on Twitter. You have users like Guy Kawasaki who go by the “let’s follow everyone who follows me” rule and then you have other users like Conan O’Brien who followed nobody until he started following a random person (and subsequently changed her life).  There is no arguing that both of these individuals have seen great success on Twitter, but have both incorporated a different mindset when it came to following other users.  The question of which one is right and which one is wrong is difficult to answer since both have a substantial following base.  Granted, they were both well known before Twitter which makes it a lot easier for them  to gain  a high number of followers.  Either way, the question of “how should I go about following other users” doesn’t have a right or wrong answer as different strategies work for different people.  The messages being tweeted out and how you use Twitter to communicate with others is what truly determines your overall success.  That being said, I still follow some personal guidelines when it comes to following other users which I’m sharing below.  This doesn’t necessarily mean that following these guidelines will vastly improve your success on Twitter, but I’ve found this process to work for me the best.

1. Frequent Spammers Never Get Followed – If you want to send me an automated DM that promotes your business, fine.  If you send me ten of them, not fine.  If an account is flooding my Twitter stream with self-promotional garbage or my Direct Messages with the same type of content, they will be unfollowed, blocked, and reported for spam.   They are not contributing anything worthwhile and I could honestly care less whether or not they follow me back.  Plus, there tweets could potentially prevent me from seeing a worthwhile tweet.

2. Interesting Tweets = Follow: Might sound obvious, but if I find an account’s tweets interesting, I will follow that person.  Some users will avoid following these types of accounts if it doesn’t guarantee a follow back.  This kind of mindset misses the point of Twitter altogether. Twitter isn’t about growing followers, it’s about communicating, learning, and in some cases entertaining yourself.

3. Users Who Follow Me First (Varies from User to User): I follow users who follow me first generally 50% of the time.  If someone is following me because they seem like they are generally interested in what I have to tweet about, aren’t a spammer,  and are communicating (not just self promoting) I will almost always follow that person back.  If, however, their motives seem entirely selfish and have a tweet stream flooded with spam, I will usually not follow back.

4. Friends, Family, and “Real Life” Connections: Just like Facebook and LinkedIn, Twitter can be an effective tool to connect with people you already know or have recently met.  If you met somebody at a networking event, I recommend finding them on Twitter, following them, and then sending them a quick hello.  In my opinion, this is the most effective (and simplest) way to grow your total number of quality followers.

5. Industry Experts: This can fall under guideline 2 (interesting tweets), but I follow a select few individuals I few as “industry experts” pertaining to Internet Marketing (especially Social Media and SEO).  This approach has helped to keep me abreast of the latest news and information pertaining to my industry and has proven Twitter’s value as an educational tool. What works even better is categorizing these users via Twitter lists or custom lists on TweetDeck.

6. Brand Ambassadors: If a user tweets positively about a business whose Twitter account I’m managing, I will not only reach out to that user, but will follow them as well.   This allows me to easily see any future brand mentions by this particular user.  There are many Twitter alert tools that exist that will automatically e-mail you every time your brand is mentioned via Twitter.  If someone misspells your brand, however, this will generally go undetected in a Twitter Alert service. I implement the same strategy for individuals negatively tweeting about a brand I’m managing as well.

As mentioned, there is no right or wrong when it comes to following other users on Twitter.  As long as you are effectively communicating and informing on Twitter, your followers will grow naturally.

Click-to-call for apps and mobile website content is a new mobile advertising format that Google AdWords has released to all of its advertisers.  In order to help increase the reach of your ads across the mobile web, Google has expanded their popular click-to-call functionality on mobile search ads to now include mobile content and apps.  Not only will the click-to-call for mobile content help advertisers, but it will also provide mobile publishers and app developers with even more ways to expand their businesses and make more money.

With the availability of click-to-call, potential customers will be able to connect with your business via a phone call when they use their favorite mobile apps or when they browse the web from their mobile devices.  Ads will appear as animated banner or text ads with a call button on mobile devices that have full internet browsers.  In order to take advantage of this new format, you will have to enable phone extensions within your campaigns in the Google AdWords platform and run your ads on both the Google Display Network as well as on mobile devices with full internet browsing capabilities.

Click-to-call for mobile content and apps is just one of the many different formats that you can use in order to help achieve your mobile marketing goals.  It will also help to drive great results for both mobile publishers and app developers, and you the advertiser as well.

I recently had to call in an expert to repair a busted garage door at my home, which got me thinking about the value of expertise, especially when it comes to search engine marketing.  We tend to think that most problems can be fixed by ourselves or that we can hire a generalist to fix anything.  However I didn’t have the time or knowledge to do it myself and the generalist I considered conceded that he didn’t know how to fix it either.  So ultimately I had to call in the expert.  The same thinking often applies to SEO.  You can handle SEO in-house or you can take the “hope and pray” approach, where you basically hope that your web developer took SEO into account in designing your site, and pray that Google can understand the keywords that reflect your business.  Yet, calling the “SEO Expert” will help you navigate the search pitfalls more quickly and efficiently.  They will help you navigate potentially complex issues such as URL structure, search friendly navigation, canonicalization and site speed.

A good example of this is a client we recently helped navigate a potentially disastrous incident with Google.   This client saw their organic traffic from that engine “tank”, practically overnight.  This client called frantically, not sure exactly what had caused the problem.  An initial assessment suggested that the site had not been banned, as there were dozens of competitive keyword queries that they continued to rank for, but a large number of their news stories no longer ranked, and some of them didn’t even appear in the search results.  This suggested that something was inhibiting the ability of Googlebot to crawl and index their pages in a timely manner.   After deep digging through their analytics data, their Google webmaster account (which we had set up previously) and attempting to simulate the crawl of their site, we uncovered the “perfect storm.”  The client had upgraded their CMS without having upgraded their server capacity.  This had slowed down their server load time significantly.  The changes had also exposed an underlying URL canonicalization problem which potentially was giving the crawlers mixed signals and diluting both PageRank and inbound link juice.   All of this was compounded by the final rollout of the Caffeine Algorithm by Google.  The end result was that Googlebot could not crawl a significant portion of the sites content in timely fashion, and also assumed that the content loaded extremely slowly which reduced rankings for any content they could locate.  After several days and major backend fixes by the client, our assessment proved to be correct as their organic traffic returned to previous levels.

Many companies assume they can easily navigate the SEO maze.  However, if they are only looking top level at title tags, Meta tags, content and links, you are leaving yourself open to problems in the future.     More and more content is being indexed by the crawlers and the consolidation of search between 2 players (Google and Bing) make it that much more competitive to rank on the first page.  The search engines are tightening up their rules regarding URL canonicalization, page speed and download time.  They are offering tools such as Google and Bing webmaster, but by themselves these aren’t the easiest tools to understand.  Most businesses don’t have the time to read up on URL structure or inbound link techniques.  If you are launching a new site or want to get more organic traffic from an existing site, the least you can do is make sure you have your SEO expert on speed dial.  You never know when you might need to make that call.

This will likely be a quick post (every time I say that it ends up turning into one of my longer posts), but experienced something today that I wanted to share.  I was cleaning out the spam comments that the spam filter didn’t automatically delete and I stumbled across someone who spammed this blog about 10 times in 20 minutes.  Now, one spam comment I’ll let slide, but excessive spamming like that really gets to me.  The spammer left his name and Twitter handle in each of his comments so I reached out to the guy via Twitter and tweeted this out to him:

Simple, but to the point.  What happened next is what really blew my mind (in a negative way). Immediately after I posted the tweet, I received this reply from another Twitter user:

I JUST complained about being spammed so you immediately send me a spam tweet? Her profile baffled me even further:

This person says they are a “communications expert” who inspires others to “effectively communicate their message.”, but they send out automated tweets to spam people (look at her Twitter stream..it’s all spam)? I don’t think I ever experienced more Twitter irony (Twirony, I’m coining the phrase right now) in my life.

I normally don’t like revealing people’s Twitter or Facebook accounts if I am using them for example purposes, but given the circumstances I felt no need to conceal their identity.

Here’s the point. Promoting your business is a full time job especially given the rise in Social Media channels.  However, if you use automated devices to spam blogs or Twitter you will never succeed.  If you want to comment on a blog and leave a link to your business actually READ through the blog, make an INSIGHTFUL comment, and leave your website link in the “website” data field.  Automated spam comments will just piss people off and nobody will ever buy your product. Twitter is a communication vehicle which means you need to interact with other individuals to see the value in using it.  Using an  automated tweeting service implies that you think other users don’t have the intelligence to decipher between an automated message and actual communication.

Think of it this way, ROI = Return on Investment but “investment” doesn’t always have to mean money especially in the age of Social Media.  If you invest no time in your Social Media campaign you won’t see any return.  Sure there are tools that expedite some of the grunt work (which I definitely recommend using), but the real benefit of using these tools is to allocate that extra time you save towards bettering your Social Media campaign.

Communication, listening, and putting forth time / energy is the real key to Social Media success.  It amazes me that so many people still don’t know this.

In case you’ve been too busy enjoying the long weekend, a lot has happened in the Social Media world over the past week.  Below is a recap of some of these recent events.

1. Yahoo! Mail Turns Social – Yahoo! has decided to pretty much copy what Google has done (with Google Buzz) by implementing a platform that will allow e-mail users to share content and comments with others in their address book.  There will likely be more negative than positive with these changes as you are automatically opted into this service instead of indicating whether or not you want your address book to be able to share content with you.  Given the backlash Facebook has received with it’s privacy issues, this is really bad timing on Yahoo’s part (although they do plan on giving users a week’s “heads up” so they can opt out pre-roll out).  I can’t see how this will differ from Google Buzz, but it’s at least worth exploring to see if there are any benefits in utilizing this new feature.

2. Pennsylvania Uses FourSquare to Spark Tourism: FourSquare has partnered with VisitPA (Pennsylvania’s official tourism website) to entice FourSquare users to visit the state and its attractions.  With the partnership, FourSquare has rolled out some new Pennsylvania-specific badges and has included a number of travel tips to educate and inform Pennsylvania FourSquare users.  This partnership shows the continued growth of FourSquare and how it remains the top mobile location service. It will be interesting to see how other states (and even countries) respond to this partnership.

3. Facebook Launches U.S. Politics Page – Remember when Barack Obama and Ron Paul were considered innovators as politicians due to their usage  of Social Media? As expected, Social Media usage among politicians will likely soon become the norm. Facebook has rolled out a U.S. Politics Page that will track how officials are utilizing Facebook to connect with citizens.  George W. Bush has also recently joined Facebook and has acquired over 79,000 likes in a short period of time.

4.  Mock BP Twitter Account Donates $10,000 to GRN - It started out as a joke, but BPGlobalPR quickly evolved into a force to be reckoned with after quickly acquiring over 100,000 followers.  One of the “jokes” implemented by the account were the constant push of “free $25 BP Cares t-shirts”.  The account was apparently extremely successful in selling these shirts as it was able to donate $10,000, strictly from t-shirt sales, yesterday to GRN.  What’s fascinating about this whole ordeal is that somebody (the person remains anonymous) took an extremely troubling situation (BP oil spill), was able to successfully mock it and provide comfort in the form of humor, and made $10,000 in a short period of time that was donated to better the situation.  This is one of the more fascinating usages of Twitter in recent memory.  The real BP account has less than 10,000 followers by the way.

5. TwitPic Incorporates “Events” Feature: I’ve always been a fan of TwitPic over TweetPhoto and other Twitter image services due to its overall simplicity.  TwitPic has added a small feature to it’s site that could impact the way users organize their photos.  The website rolled out an “Events” feature that lets you list photos in a particular “event” (category). This makes organizing photos a lot easier as it basically allows users to create their individual albums on TwitPic.  It also might entice people to look at photos through an entire album as opposed to checking out photos individually, therefore increasing view count on image content.

6. LinkedIn Sharing – LinkedIn has rolled out a new feature that makes distributing news articles, job offers, and other content a lot easier.  By adding a button to your toolbar, you can share content to your status, individual connections, or groups.  While this will serve as an effective time saver, I think this will flood LinkedIn with a lot more useless content.  LinkedIn has always seemed a lot more professional and personal than other Social Networks.  I have some concerns that there could be an overwhelming amount of spam distributed as a result of the new feature which would really compromise LinkedIn’s value.

7. Twitter Testing New Feature – Twitter has been testing a new feature that allows you to see followers you have in common with someone else.  The feature is called “you both follow”  and is very similar to Facebook’’s mutual friend feature.  I know many people personally who feel more comfortable connecting with someone on Facebook and LinkedIn  if they have at least one mutual friend.  It would be interesting to see if the acceptance rate of Twitter connections increase because of this.

What would a television be without the internet?  What would the internet be without television?  These are the types of questions we will be asking ourselves in 5 to 10 years.  Google recently announced a new platform called Google TV.  This mega merger of entertainment will bring all kinds of web content right into the family room.  A concept that has been dreamed about for a long time by many different electronics and software companies.  This concept is nothing new, there are many devices on the market today that attempt to merge this concept, but what’s different here is that it’s not just Google, its Intel, and Sony all working together to bring this to fruition.

Why would Google want to bother mixing what they do best with the family room television?  Google has recently been on the forefront of developing applications (apps) for both the computer and smartphones.  The software platforms are Google’s chrome software and Android technology.  Both open software platforms will allow many different types of apps to function in a media environment.  This combination of super power companies will allow the regular TV user to enhance their viewing experience.  Google’s motto has always been to enhance the users’ experience.  Imagine now the possibilities of an internet technology company dominating the viewing experience in the living room.

Google TV in a majority of homes has many different advertising, marketing and data mining applications.  Google has the opportunity to become the largest ratings and data provider, surpassing an industry monopolized by Nielsen.  This advantage of being a ratings and data provider will give Google a large advantage over the Nielsen ratings which have a mystery to within their own.  The Nielsen ratings have never been able to prove how accurate these ratings are due to the fact that it’s such a small sampling of the population.   If a major media player were to own this important piece of entertainment data, the financial possibilities are endless.  Could we see AdWords and product placements during actual TV shows?  Could there be advertising on top of commercials?  Could you opt in to certain advertisers, such as movie trailers and products of interest?  Google has the potential to become a market maker and own a very large piece on the ground floor of a new and innovative advertising platform.

Imagine a travel company is offering its website visitors deals about tropical Caribbean destinations.  These visitors look through the travel company’s offers, but end up not booking a trip.  Later on in that same visitors search to other travel websites, they see travel deals from competitors.  Because of new innovations from Google, this travel company has the opportunity to reach these web visitors across the internet on a variety of related websites targeting the travel company’s past visitors.

This new ad innovation from Google is called Remarketing!  Any AdWords advertiser is able to use remarketing to reach users as they’re searching the web, allowing you to show ads to users who’ve previously visited your website as they are browsing through sites within the Google Content Network.  Remarketing is a simple way to connect with users, based on their past interactions with your website.

What’s great about remarketing is the ability for businesses to reach past users who are more likely to be receptive to your businesses previous ad campaigns and special offers.  Remarketing helps advertisers and websites receive a higher return on their investments.  It also is a way to have more relevant and useful ads for specific users, with more opportunities for your customers to receive discounts and special offers that may be of interest to them.

For those of you who do not know, Twitter lists are a feature of Twitter that allows users to create lists (i.e. marketing, technology, sports, etc.) and add other users  onto that list.   Every time you are added to a “list” it adds to your “listed total” which is located next to your followers (see screenshot below of my Twitter account):

Members often use this feature to add people to a specific list that they feel best represent that category.  I have an Internet Marketing list, for example, that lists about 16 members who I feel provide great Internet Marketing advice. Seems like a simplistic feature, and it is, but Twitter Lists can be of great use beyond this.  Below I’ve listed 5 ways to use Twitter lists.

1. Assess Brand Perception: This applies to both your personal brand and your company.  Look at all the lists you’ve been added to and assess if there is a common theme.  You might be surprised which lists you fall under.  This is extremely helpful in determining peoples’ perceptions  towards your company and your Twitter account.  If you sell health food, for example, and you see that half of the lists you’ve been added to are called “junk food”,  it is important to analyze why.  Are your tweets sending the wrong message? Are people just not aware that your items are actually healthy? Are there random tweets pertaining to your company that are branding you as “junk food”.  It is okay to reach out to the person who started the list and ask them why they felt your brand was appropriate to add to that list. Take the opportunity to use your Twitter lists as valuable market research and make any necessary revisions to future tweets if applicable.

2. Organize Your Followers: I find Twitter Lists useful because instead of going through every single person I’m following, I can organize them by individual categories.  One of the better ways to organize your Twitter lists is to separate your followers by “business” (industry experts, clients, employees, etc.) along with “personal” (friends, family, etc.).  TweetDeck is great at taking Twitter Lists and organizing them even further. If there was a popular news item that occurred within your industry, for example, you can look through your industry experts lists on TweetDeck and actually search for a specific keyword within that list.  It’s a way to find the information you are looking for as quickly and easily as possible.

3. Educate Yourself – You can follow other Twitter lists that you didn’t necessarily create.  If you want to learn more about a certain topic or industry, there will likely be a list created for it already.  Find the one(s) that has a lot of followers (not necessarily users who were added to the list, but people following that list) and observe the conversations taking place.

4.  Keep Your Company Tweeters in One Place – This applies to individuals who have more than one person tweeting on behalf of a brand.  If you have multiple company tweeters, organize them in a Twitter list and encourage users to follow that list.  You might only be able to tweet x times / day, but combine that with your other company tweeters and it can add up to a branded tweet every few seconds all under one central location.  The nightclub industry can greatly benefit from implementing this strategy. Most have a company Twitter account, but also have dozens (if not more) club promoters and employees tweeting on behalf of the club.  Organizing these people onto one branded Twitter list is effective in keeping people “in the know” on all things related to that club.

5.  RSS Feed Syndication – Ever find a Twitter list with a great stream of information? Why not take the list and aggregate it as an RSS feed onto your website.  If you find it useful so might your website visitors.  Twitter lists to do not have an RSS feed, but you can create one by visiting this site.  My Internet Marketing list, for example, changes from this: http://twitter.com/dave0911/internet-marketing to http://twiterlist2rss.appspot.com/dave0911/lists/internet-marketing/statuses.rss.