ORGANIZE YOUR TWITTER LIFE: TWITTER LISTS AND SEARCHES

Welcome to Day 14 of the 31 Days of Marketing Your Freelance Business Series! For the month of October we are going to be covering a ton of different ways you can market your business and get more clients.

Twitter is an amazing tool for sharing and finding content, keeping up with news, and making connections with new people. Twitter is also a giant and overwhelming time suck full of information that is completely useless to you. To make Twitter work for you, you have to be able to find the good stuff.

Luckily, there are a few built-in features that make this so much easier to accomplish (thanks Twitter developers!).

First of all, who should you follow?

Twitter is only as good as the people you follow. If you’re only following people that strictly post about Ninja Turtles cartoons, it’s probably not going to help you advance your career or connect with prospects (unless you are a freelance Ninja Turtles artist in which case, what is your website ’cause I’m gonna need some of that art). You should actually follow:

• other freelancers, entrepreneurs, influencers, and colleagues in your field
• bloggers you just can’t get enough of
• news sites and sources related to you field
• mentors and people you look up to
• your clients – past, present and future
• interesting and exciting people

You want your twitter feed to be informative and interesting, and full of people you’d love to connect with for work, projects, or cocktails. Not everyone you follow has to be directly related to your career, either. Work isn’t your whole life, after all.

Create twitter lists

Twitter has this great feature where you can organize people into lists that you create based on topics of your choice. When you look at your list, it only shows updates from those people rather than everyone you follow. This can seriously cut down the noise of your home feed and make the hunt for good content to retweet go much quicker.

You can organize your lists however you like. I have lists for freelance resources, blogs I love, girl bosses, social media news, and Montreal. I know the kinds of content to expect when I look in each of these lists, which makes the process of finding a great article to retweet, or finding out where my favourite taco food truck is parked in the city, so much easier. Huge time saver right here guys.

You can easily manage your twitter lists with Twitlistmanager, a free tool. Simply create your lists and add people by checking the boxes in the grid. The lists you create can be private or public. When you create public lists anyone can see and follow them, and the members of the list get a notification when they’re added. Hint: call your list something easy to determine but flattering so the people you add will be stoked and want to connect with you.

Save a few twitter searches

In the search bar in the top right of the twitter page, you can look for anything. People, hashtags, keywords, photos, anything. It’s a good idea to save a few searches that you might use more frequently. A few suggestions:

• your name or brand name
• hashtags for any twitter chats you participate in
• relevant hashtags in your industry or field
• conference, webinar, or event hashtags
• commonly used hashtags, keywords, or phrases of your customers and ideal clients

You can save any search you like if you think you will need to remember or you will be calling on it again in the future. It can definitely save you time when you’re frantically searching and trying to remember the hashtag of that thing you went to that one time. What? It could happen.

Mute people

A newer feature on twitter, you can now mute people instead of unfollowing them. This means that you don’t have to see their updates about how terrible Megan Fox was in the most recent Ninja Turtles film (I’m assuming), but you don’t have to feel like a jerk for unfollowing them entirely. You might use this feature so you don’t have to see updates from old classmates and colleagues that you don’t want to hear, or to block out your dad’s terrible puns (you are cold!). I personally have never used this, but thought it was worth mentioning as a way to block the constant twitter noise.

Now that you have an organized twitter account, you can focus on sharing awesome content and make connecting with those that matter practically painless.