Twitter Lists have been one of the best innovations our friends in San Francisco have come up with, in my humble opinion.  There are so many possible ways Twitter Lists can be used – we’ve only just started to scratch the surface. Trust me on this one.

Part of using Twitter, Twitter Lists, and social media as a whole, is looking at yourself as a user from the outside in.  How often do you think of yourself in terms how you look as an agent in the Matrix (yes, the movie…).

We all have mentors and groups of people we admire in our business lives.  I certainly do.  And in the end, everyone has somebody who we see as a successful role model.  We want to be like our role models.  That’s the whole “model” part of the term, right?

Benchmarking Using Twitter Lists
Ever wonder how the content you share on Twitter stacks up against the folks you dig as relevant and helpful?  Maybe your group is other business owners in your local market.  Maybe it’s your competitors?  Your Twitter List might be made up of other nationally recognized bloggers or bloggers in your niche market?

Whatever your list is, here’s a self-benchmarking idea you might try in 5 easy steps:

• Build a Twitter List of all the people you want to benchmark yourself against
• Add yourself to that Twitter List
• Set up that Twitter List as a column in whatever social media monitoring tool you use (Hootsuite, Seesmic and Tweetdeck are what I use)
• Monitor the column and take notice of what your group tweets out over the course of a day, week or ongoing
• Tweet out the content you normally do over the course of the day

As you watch, ask yourself some of these questions:

• How often do my tweets show up in the stream in comparison to the other members of the list? Do I tweet frequently enough to be noticed?
• How does your content look next to theirs?  Similar?  Different?
• Are my Twitter List members sharing more links than I am?  Where do those links lead to?
• What type of content do they share?  What are they vetting as relevant?
• How do the folks on my Twitter List structure their tweets?  Are mine similar or different?
• What’s the number of @replies the folks on my Twitter List typically tweet through out the day?  Do I talk with that many people?

What questions would you add to your own self-benchmarking as a Twitter user?

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