At the end of October, Twitter began rolling out its newest feature: Lists. Lists allows users to create groups of other Twitter accounts, which they can then share with their followers.

It is a good way of keeping track of tweets from a certain group or sub-section of tweeters, allowing you to track their updates and/or find new people to follow.

The introduction of Lists has seen people busily listing their interesting followers. There are good reasons why Lists have become so popular and why brands should consider using Lists as an integral part of their tweeting:

1. Demonstrate your knowledge and spread the love

It’s always a great compliment to be publicly recognised for something. Whether it is through being musically inclined or just as someone’s friend, Lists are a great way for recommending certain followers within a niche. You’ll also get credit from those you add to a list; they may even add you in return.

2. Organise your followers

For those who don’t already use a desktop client, like Tweetdeck, to organise their Twitter feed into groups, Lists can be helpful to keep up to date with a specific group of people you are interested in.

3. Rank popularity, or usefulness

It used to be that you could get a pretty good idea of a Twitter account’s ‘value’ or ‘influence’ by the number of followers it had, but now with the number of spammy accounts using automated software to find followers, it’s getting harder to tell who is popular and who is junk. With people organising their followers into Lists, the number of Lists an account is placed on becomes another good way of determining influence, especially within certain subject areas.

For brands, these are three very compelling reasons for using Lists. It is also a good way to bring together all the tweeters in your organisation under one banner.

With this in mind, we’ve been playing around with Lists ourselves. You can now easily check out what the Wildfire team are tweeting about here: http://twitter.com/wildfirepr/wildfire-pr