Harness the Twittersphere with New Twitter Features

If you are working to harness Twitter to help build your Internet presence, you should know about the latest Twitter innovations – Twitter lists and Project Retweet.

Twitter lists are a new innovation that let you create your own customized lists, or access other users’ lists. It’s an open source approach to tame the Twittersphere that allows you to organize fellow Twitterers by relationship, expertise, topics, or whatever suits your fancy. Anyone can create a list and become curator of that list. Twitter currently allows only 20 lists per user, and up to 500 names per list, but that’s still a lot to keep track of.

Who knows? Twitter lists could become a real innovation to marketers looking to carve out a niche on Twitter. We will have to see what creative approaches people start to apply, and see what the developers start doing with this new feature.

Project Retweet has been anxiously awaited by a number of the Twitterers  I follow. This is a new beta program that basically adds a retweet icon to each microblog post, allowing you to immediately retweet posts without manually cutting and pasting the Tweet content. If you use some of the third-party Twitter applications, like TweetDeck, this feature has already been included. However, Twitter has just added it as part of their Web AUI to you can now retweet at the click of an icon.

If you read the Twitter blog post, you will also see that this new icon is just the tip of the iceberg. Twitter developers are opening up a new API that will help aggregate retweets, even beyond your immediate sphere of contacts. And if you find the retweets annoying, you can turn them off.

The point here is that Twitter is adding new ways to help you extend your sphere of online influence in a way that promote your personal brand and expertise. Now you can build new lists that relate to your expertise and your professional passions and share those lists with the world. And you can share retweets beyond your sphere of influence which can help extend your brand.

Now if Twitter could only start coming up with a revenue model…

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

three + 18 =