A Quick Way To Measure Your Personal Brand Using Twitter Lists

Use Twitter Lists to see how people are branding you on Twitter. Are the results what you expect?

A simple branding test

One of the nice things about personal branding is the ease of verifying your efforts- just ask people in your target audience what comes to mind when they think of you:

• If their answers match up with your personal branding, good job! Keep doing what you’re doing and look for ways to reach more people.
• If their answers don’t match your personal branding, try to understand why so you can decide what action to take.

Is this really necessary? What if this information is already available, current and can be found in an instant?

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How Twitter Lists makes this test even simpler

In her writeup about Twitter Lists, Heather Huhman gives some useful tips about how to use Twitter Lists for personal branding.

One thing Heather said is “if you can get yourself on the right lists, the effort will go a long way toward building your follower base and your brand.” Which is true, if the right lists are ones that match your personal brand.

How can you tell?

One way you can tell is to see which Lists are following you by visiting your Twitter Lists page and browsing who Listed you and on which List. Unless you’re just starting out in your branding efforts – in which case you probably won’t be on many relevant Lists yet anyway – you’ll probably be able to recognize the “right Lists” at a glance.

However, the Twitter Lists page only shows 20 Lists at a time so it can be time-consuming to get a really good idea of how people are Listing you.

Good thing there’s a better way.

The List Tags tool

The swissmiss design blog – one of my favorites – was where I discovered MustExist’s List Tags tool, one of the Twitter Lists tools I mentioned in my How To Best Use Twitter Lists article.

According to the homepage:

“When people add you to Twitter lists, they tag you.

What do Twitter lists say about you? Enter your Twitter username and find out. Look up others too!”

List Tags then takes your username, compares all the Lists following you and generates a tag cloud with the results, where the more frequent terms appear larger than others:

• If the larger tags are words you use to brand yourself – congratulations, personal branding success!
• If the larger tags include words unrelated to your personal brand- you still have brand-building work to do. That said, by understanding where the unrelated tags came from, you’ll get an idea of the actions you need to take.

Finally- if you’re just starting out in your branding efforts and only have a few Twitter Lists following you, don’t expect much from this test. As you can imagine, the more Lists following you, the better the results will be as more people will have “voted”.

Try MustExist’s List Tags tool now- are you surprised by the results?

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I originally published a version of this article on the terrific Personal Branding Blog.

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