Don’t Get Sucked Into Twitter Lists

Uncategorized October 28, 2009 7 Comments @niallharbison

Remember when people were desperately trying to get links on other blogs sidebars? Or trying to get as many fans as possible on Myspace? Or trying to get to 100 fans to claim their Facebook vanity URL? The race is just about to start again and the latest object of people’s desire? Twitter lists.

For those of you not familiar with Twitter lists they are a new feature that Twitter are releasing on to the site that allows users to create their own lists of people they like. So I can group “top techies” or “great chefs” and others can see these lists and choose to follow people on the lists. The big problem with all this…Twitter decided toshow just how many lists people are on public on all profiles.

There is always some sort of race on in social media and the latest one that will inevitably kick off is the race to appear on as many lists as possible. People will soon forget all about the race to get the most followers and the people who spent hours of time manually adding followers or writing scripts will now move on to trying to get themselves on to as many lists as possible. The big problem with this? It just keeps on happening and people just don’t realize that it is a massive waste of time. Lists are just the latest fad. Sure they are controlled by the users and will be a lot harder to game and should provide an instant insight into somebodies authority but you know the lists will get gammed before long and people will spend hours trying to get on as many as possible.

Smart people like Robert Scoble are saying that the lists are the next big thing and that they will change the way we use the service but wasn’t he following 80,000 people on Twitter months ago before having to remove them all? The game is always changing and people should just focus on creating great content and if they do that they are sure to appear on tons of lists, have lots of followers, fans or whatever the latest social media trend is. Don’t get suckered in this time

Comments

http://thisiswhatido.org Darragh

AHEM!!

http://www.simplyzesty.com/social-media/twitter-lists-finally-kills-numbers-game-twitter/

Direct quotes:

“The new and more definitive way of finding who is influential and worth following on Twitter… A new popularity race has just started on Twitter and luckily this time you wonâ€™t be able to manually bump your chances but instead you will just have to writ really great content, be respected in your field or be seen as influential. This is the feature that could really take Twitter to a whole new level, very exciting indeed.”

Has your opinion really changed so much in 9 days?
http://www.simplyzesty.com Niall Harbison

The feature is more robust against spam and I can defo see the value but it will inevitably try and get gamed as usual. I think if used correctly it will help people to find some great new followers. Used incorrectly and as a race it will become useless. The biggest point of this post is to try and persuade people to not try and start gaming the system and appear on the lists organically.
http://thisiswhatido.org Darragh

Fair enough. Not sure how you could game it – which is why I really liked your first post on it, but yes, agree with you it’s a bit pointless, especially as it’s really only useful to the list creator. Saying that, I’ve got about 15 lists now, though all on private. Don’t really see the point in creating a public one – if you want to know who I think is great, look at who I talk to, follow and retweet

http://www.simplyzesty.com Niall Harbison

Yeah agreed on that. They should have probably just made them private, would have saved a lot of hassle. You will get people creating bogus accounts and adding themsleves to hundreds of lists, people begging influential friends to add them to lists, all the usual stuff. Like I said before I want to make a list of “wa@%&rs”, that would make some fun reading!

http://twitter.com/bugsyrocker bugsy

Status does not come in quantity, it comes in quality. Lists might be a great way to organize some of my favorite people, but they’ll only add me to a list if I provide value. I won’t be racing to get on as many lists as possible. My top priority is still to continue doing what I do, and make things happen. Being on more lists than Sam, Joe, and Pete makes no difference in what I accomplish.

Or something like that.

http://www.simplyzesty.com Niall Harbison

Yeah Budgsy that is the right spirit to be doing it in and if everybody treated it like that we would be laughing but the fear I have is that people will inevitably try and game the system! People seem to be getting very excited about the feature though athough many saying it is a lot of hard work. Will be interesting to see how it goes

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Don’t Get Sucked Into Twitter Lists

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