Remember the days when we were perfectly fine not knowing where everyone was all the time. When we could just go through our day completely unaware that our best friend was picking up a sandwich from Subway. Well, the world is not what it used to be.
With the increased popularity of applications such as FourSquare, sites such as Yelp, and services such as Yodle, we are constantly being connected to the people and places around us, even if we are unaware of it happening. In the last 3 months, I have noticed a drastic increase in the use of Foursquare. People declaring their “mayor”-hood of the coffee shop around the corner or their favorite burger joint. Being a Foursquare mayor basically means going to a place and telling people the most.
So what does this mean for social media? It means that people are starting to think of these tools as a way to connect to their local community instead of the global community. The trend seems to be piggy-backing on the larger “think globally, act locally” mantra. The tools we are using are global, but the way we are using them is connecting us more to our direct communities. Although social media can still be used to keep in contact with people around the world, it is having a bigger impact on those places and people closest to us.
We can find an area restaurant since their SEO has been “upped” by Yodle, go there cause we read glowing reviews on Yelp, and then Foursquare that we are there. Has there ever been a time when your community has been more accessible?
However, although I do love late night Chinese food…am unsure if I want the world to know I could be “mayor” of the New Hong Kong.
In the last few weeks Twitter has come out with their latest feature, Lists. The basic function of Lists is to allow users to group people into separate categories based on interests and location, or pretty much anything they can think of. The Lists can be comprised of anyone who is a Twitter user without a protected account. Once a List is created, other people can follow it.
I am still attempting to use Lists and have been monitoring other people’s use of them. One benefit I can see from the new function is that it makes it easier to follow those people you are most interested in. Once a user is following over 500 people, updates from those that are most important to you are easily lost in the stream. By creating a list, those updates and connections can be much easier to keep track of.
Tweetdeck has actually been using their own version of Lists for a while. Users could create their own categories, but can only include people they followed. Twitter takes that prerequisite out of the equation.
How can businesses us Twitter Lists?
Businesses can use Lists in order to organize their contacts and optimize the time they spend on Twitter. One of the arguments against using Twitter for business purposes is that it takes too much time. Lists allow you to organize that time so you can keep updated on the contacts that will deliver the most value.
For example, at CGI we would utilize the Lists by people’s interest in our services, Flash, PowerPoint, video, web. We could then answer people’s questions in those area’s more efficiently and hence decrease the amount of time we are looking around our account to answer specific questions.
Have you used Lists? Do you feel it is one way Twitter is setting themselves up in order to eventually earn revenue?
