I've written about Formulists before, but they've kindly introduced me to a new aspect of their service which is worth a look. Basically Formulists allows you to create lists of people on Twitter, but not the usual offering that Twitter natively gives you. You can create lists for 'People like me', 'Sort my following', 'Who I recently followed' and more. They provide dozens of pre-set lists based on your own account, and these lists can constantly update themselves.
What's interesting though is that their Formulytics option really does give some interesting data on the particular lists that you have created - and since it's also possible to create lists based around a hashtag it's worth playing with.
First of all, create an account. I've already done this, so a snippet from my home page looks like this:
Click to add more lists and you have the options:
Under the 'Expand your network' option you can choose to "See Who Uses a Hashtag or Search Term Most". This gives you a variety of options:
Choose your options, hashtag and then Formulists will go away and create a list. The default is for 40 people, but you can increase this to a total of 500. The more people you choose, the longer it takes to create the list - I set mine up and came back the next day and it was all done, but don't necessarily expect it to take a few seconds.
I created a list for people who tweet with the hashtag #savelibraries. This gave me a total of 383 accounts to follow, and I can check such options as to see who is particularly engaged with the hashtag, key influencers, 'social hubs' - the small number of people who really drive the use of the hashtag forward, most re-tweeted tweets using the hashtag, timings - an analysis of the last week, with days and times for tweets and retweets, popular content, top locations and top keywords in biographies. Here's a few screenshots:
Times to engage, tweet or retweet.
Some of the key social hubs for #savelibraries
And lastly, some of the influencers. Not surprising to see some familiar faces in that collection!
You can see the list by visiting the public page that's created for it, though you don't get all the analytical data that I've mentioned above. Formulists is a commercial product, but you can create a free subscription which has 2 lists, daily updates, and you have to visit every couple of months. Plan details for Pro and Supreme accounts are available.
I enjoy using Formulists - it's a really good way to keep on top of what's happening with Twitter, and if you've got a few minutes, it's worth trying out.
(Under full disclosure: Formulists let me have a supreme account to play around with but they didn't ask me to blog about the service unless I wished to, and they made no restrictions on what I could say. So my words as usual are my own, and I think you all know me well enough to know that if I thought something was rubbish I'd say so!)
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