Understand Your Niche

Recently I found out about a really simple tool, Follow Lists, designed to allow anyone to create a list of tweeple in a category. It’s just starting out, so there aren’t many lists yet; even so, I found a few worthwile lists:

• SEO — a list of the top 20 SEO experts to follow.
• Google Apps — a list of Google Apps with twitter presence.
• Top Web Designers — a list of 15 top-line web designers on twitter.
• Eco — a list of some cool eco-minded tweeple.
• Mesiab Lab — a list of the people working at Mesiab Lab Inc.
• Domain Traders — a list of active domain name traders.

The service, as I said, is very very new, and still in its infancy. However, I can see how it can be very useful for a variety of purposes:

• Looking for an expert in a certain subject? Search Follow List (when they add search functionality) to find them. You can already search indirectly, by searching for the #followlists tag — that’s how I found the lists I mentioned above, so you can do it too.
• Make a list of your friends, make a list of clients, make a list of ex-girlfriends or ex-boyfriends, etc. etc. etc. — the possibilities are endless.
• Use a list for your #followfriday faves and recommend all of them with one tweet — just tweet the URL of the list instead of the @names on your list.

There are some missing features that I’d like to see them add, besides the already-mentioned missing search functionality:

• A “follow” button next to each name in a list. That way you can follow right from the list, instead of having to visit each profile and click “follow”, which is kind of clunky.
• An “unfollow” button.
• Optionally show the bio, #tweets, #followers, #following, last time they tweeted and what they said, next to each name in a list. That way you can quickly determine if you want to follow them, without having to visit their profile.
• Adding a whole list of tweeple to a list at once, maybe as a comma separated list.
• I didn’t test it enough to determine if there’s support for editing an existing list you own, but if not, that would be a great function to have.
• Tweet-to-your-list. What you’d do is send a direct message to Follow Lists with the name of the list you want to tweet to, and the tweet. Of course this should be allowed only for the owner of the list, to prevent spamming.
• Follow-a-list and Unfollow-a-list. You’d send a direct message to Follow Lists with the name of the list for which you want to follow all members. Follow Lists would then behave as if you pressed the “follow” or “unfollow” button next to each name in the list.

So, the bottom line is that this is a great service with a lot of potential. Please support them and use them, so that  they can quickly grow and find out what users want.

URL: http://followlists.com/