You've read all the buzz about segmenting your market, categorizing your email marketing lists and personalizing your newsletters. Recently Twitter expanded its List function to enable you to do the same with your followers. Prior to May 2013, users could have a maximum of 20 separate lists with up to 500 profiles on each. Now you can create up to 1,000 lists and have 5,000 followers listed on each one. That's a lot of market segments, and it could completely change the way you use Twitter for your business. 
Create Relevant Lists
The purpose of lists is to create relevance for your customers and followers by segmenting them into categories, which enables you to send tweets personalized for specific groups. Set up lists that are named appropriately, both for your benefit and for users who may want to follow a list. For example, if your business offers home improvement services, you may want one list for Kitchen Renos and another for Beautiful Bathrooms. While list names are limited to 25 characters, you should make them specific to tell users what they are about. By following a list, the user gets to view all the tweets from users who are members of the list.
Set the Visibility
You can set your Twitter lists to be private or public at the time you create them. Public lists are visible to all users, and they can be shared online with followers to draw their attention. You can add users to the lists, or they can add themselves. Private lists are useful for you to keep track of groups of users you are particularly interested in. That's a tall order when you're dealing with 25,000 contacts, but now you can group them into five lists or 25 to keep an eye on their feeds.
Build Your List
Build up your list by adding users by name or by going to your Following or Followers pages. You can add anyone as long as you are following them or they follow you, and you can add the same user to more than one list. For example, you can add the same user to a geographical list as well as to an industry list. So perhaps Joe Smith is a former satisfied client in Memphis, and you want to keep track of him. You can do so by adding him to your list of former clients and your list of Memphis contacts.
Spark Engagement
Twitter lists are an ideal way to create engagement and build relationships through social media. If you want to attract website visitors to get a conversation going about the latest in flooring trends, for example, posting tweets about the issue to your Flooring target list as well as your Prospective Customer List will help you to generate excitement among people who are genuinely interested in the topic. Leave the users on your Swimming Pool list out of the discussion—there's little chance they are going to be interested in flooring, anyway.
Find New Herds
Use your Twitter lists for following trending topics as well. If you're interested in changes to legislation that affect the building code, you might want to create a Building Code list that uses a topic or hashtag that you want to follow. Once your list is set up, you can follow the stream of tweets on the topic you specified. This gives you access not only to your own followers and "followees," but also to strangers who operate in the same industry as you do. Using lists enables you to segment your market, expand your horizons and build your brand.
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