You know you need Twitter for your business. You’re following people who seem important and helpful. You’re following locals who might shop at your business. You’re following your cousin/ex-boyfriend/neighbor.

And then allofasudden your Twitter stream is full to over-flowing and you’re wasting time digging through tweets that are really just photos of lattes.

Enough.  Let’s use Twitter lists to make your Twitter life a million times easier.
(P.S. You can follow me on Twitter here)

1. Figure out what your goals are and follow accordingly
I’d like to teach a class about internet awesome-ry at a local liberal arts university. So, I researched the instructors and department heads of every single marketing, communication, and PR class in the Twin Cities, found their Twitter accounts, and followed them.

You can do the same! Want to write for magazines? Follow all the writers and editors of the magazines you’d like to pitch. Want to collaborate with fashion bloggers who wear a lot of thrifted clothing? Find ’em and follow ’em.

2. Make a Twitter list for each goal
Magazine editors go in one list. Travel writers another list. Fashion bloggers another list. Potential clients? Yup, separate list. If you don’t want people to know that you’re stalking for a specific purpose, make your lists private.

3. Each day, spend 10-20 minutes networking with a different list
Maybe on Monday you respond to and retweet fashion bloggers. Tuesday = editors. Wednesday = travel writers. Make sure that your tweets are genuine, helpful, and (preferably) funny.

4. Pitch them!
After you’ve been doing this for a month or two, go ahead and pitch them! By now they’ll hopefully recognize your name and URL because you’re Twitter buddies. So when you show up in their inbox offering a guest post or a press release, they’ll be all “Oh, hello! It’s my old friend So-and-so! I surely want to help her because she’s a good friend with whom I have an established relationship! Huzzah!”

See? Easy peasy.  Do you have any awesome Twitter tricks to share?

photo by Garrett Heath // cc