myTweetPack.com: Building Your Potential Lists

In the last post, we learned about the importance of Alpha Wolves in myTweetPack.com. Alphas give us a good variety of tweets. That's important. 

No one wants to just hear us talking about ourselves. They also provide some excellent potential people to follow.

We touched on how the potential follows list gets built. If you watched the video, you saw what we do about people who follow us before we follow them.

This post will discuss the Potential Follows List in greater detail. I'll show you how to build and maintain it. 

Relax, no hard hats or overalls required.

Coffee, yes. Hard hat, no.

First Things First

It's a potential follows list. Accent on the word potential. We want a large, active following that is interested in our stuff. To accomplish that, we need a bunch of people who probably fit the bill. That's our Potential Follows List. 

We then filter that list to tighten it up.

That's when it becomes a Follows List. That's when we can schedule out a slow trickle of follows. We go low and slow to avoid wild swings in follower/following counts. 

Building the Potential Follows List

You have many tools at your disposal. You can work from hashtags. You can work from lists. You can work from retweets and mentions (Alphas). 

We already touched on that last one, Alpha Retweets and Mentions. I'll just add a couple of notes to it. 

First, the tweeps you pull from Alpha retweets and mentions are usually the best fitting ones. 

That's the good news.

The bad news is that you won't pull all that many. Certainly, you won't pull enough to feed your GRRowth System. Alphas are players and players tend to repeat retweets and mentions of other players. 

You may even end up having to replace an Alpha or two. I did.

Working From Hashtags

I resisted adding this feature. 

Just like anyone can follow anyone on Twitter, so can anyone use any hashtag. It seemed like an exercise in futility. If I tweet a picture of my cats under #contentMarketing, it doesn't make it so.

This app was crowd built right here. People like hashtags. They finally convinced me by pointing out that it would be a handy thing to have right after a tweet chat. 

I had already decided to build a tweet chat moderation and promotion module, so that did fit in.

To make a long story short, we have a follow by hashtag system. You can see it at work in the video on the previous post. I'll embed it here too.

A caveat: Don't make this your go-to method. Yes, you can get a bunch of potential follows in a hurry. They'll be all over the map. We want a scalpel, not a chainsaw. It's better to reserve this method for after tweet chats. They don't even have to be your tweet chats. One user pulled all respondents from his competitor's tweet chat into his potential follows list. Then he went on to every hashtag they used anywhere.

Nice.

Another good use for this method is with small, less well-known hashtags. For example, I use #myTweetPack. No one else does, at least for now. That one should stay fairly well targeted for a while.

Yes, we want a scalpel, not a chainsaw. Of course, if you want a chainsaw, have at it. Use #twitter if you like.

Working from Twitter Lists

Twitter lists are great. Many people don't know about them. Many others don't use them. twitter Lists are a way to categorize tweeps. You can make a list of all your followers who are into marketing. Another list can be for those who like cooking. Whatever condition is significant to you, you can create a Twitter List to hold them.

So can other people.

So do many news outlets and major companies.

So do industry groups and associations.

List owners can add people to their lists. Those are members. 

People can follow a list. Those are subscribers.

Adding someone to a list takes more effort than simply clicking a follow button. It is logical to assume that that would signal a deeper connection or interest.

Wouldn't it be great to be able to peek at someone else's list?

Wouldn't it be great to be able to see who added someone to a list? We'd even be able to see who added us to a list!

Well . . .You can!

From the GRRowth Strategies page, Advanced Strategies, choose Work from Twitter Lists. 

Click on Collect/Update List Data and you'll end up here.

I'm on over 1300 lists. It will take a bit of time

If instead, I enter a twitter handle in the other box, the system will collect anyone who added them to a list. That too takes time.

In either case, the system needs to collect the user data, compare it to what is stored. Insert it if its new. Increment a counter if it isn't, then move one to the next.

I find it's a good idea to jot down user info when I look around. If I see someone with many lists, I take a note to look closer here.

Definitely run each of your Alphas through this process. 

The Other List Method

You can also peek at someone's lists to pull members and subscribers. You do that by clicking the Collect Members and Subscribers from A User's Lists. Here is a partial listing of mashable's lists.

Select one that suits you, click Submit. Easy-peasy.

Mashable has a bunch of nice fat lists on just about any subject. Other great lists are from USAtoday, HuffPost, HuffpostBiz, marshallk, goodmenProject, and niume_official. Look around and you'll find tons more.

Enjoy.

Overkill is a good thing

Don't worry if you end up with many thousands. They're only potential follows at this point. Besides, I can guarantee that you won't ever do anything with at least 25% of the profiles you pull out.

Targeting is filtering.

That'll be for next time.

Here's that video repeat I promised you.