Social Karma: The 2 Most Important Twitter Lists You’ll Ever Create

This is a simple idea that came to me late tonight while doing my regular Twitter karma health check. A karma health check is just an exercise to see who is talking about you in either a positive or negative way via one of many social media channels.

The basic concept is to maintain 2 private Twitter lists, one with positive mentions of your name or brand, and one with any negative discussions that are happening in the Twittersphere.

A Simple 3-Step Process

In about 15 minutes you will have a powerful method of identifying and prioritizing an essential part of your social media workload.

Follow along, it’s positively (or negatively) awesome…

Step 1 – Create your Twitter Karma Lists

Create 2 new lists in Twitter called “Good Karma” and “Bad Karma”. Make them both private as this isn’t for public consumption – just your own personal productivity and customer interaction management.

Step 2 – Start with Good Twitter Karma

Now you’ll want to hit the @unbounce (use your own name) link in the right-hand menu of Twitter. This will show you most of the mentions you’ve had. I find that it can miss quite a few mentions for some reason, so a more accurate method is to enter your account name in the search box and use that for your results.

Now walk through every person that mentioned you. Add them to the Good Karma Twitter List if they said something nice about you or retweeted your content.

Step 3 – Finish with Bad Twitter Karma

Repeat the process and add anyone that may have said something negative (hopefully unless you are a massive company there will be none or very few of these).

Putting Your Lists Into Play

Now that you have your Karma lists set up you need to do something with them.

Squash Bad Karma

Bad Karma comes first this time around. Deal with all potential customer service or personal brand issues immediately and do it in a transparent and honest way – starting with a public apology and a promise to deal with the situation immediately. You might want to jump back on Twitter after resolving an issue to check in with the person who made the complaint, to try and entice an “it’s all good now dude” response from the customer – this is amazing PR.

Nurture Your Good Karma As Often As Possible

This is the fun part. Set aside a portion of your week to re-connect with your fans and friends. The idea is to recognize and reward the people who have done right by you. If you have a few minutes to spare, you can dip into your Good Karma Jar any time you like and do something good for someone else.

Some ways you can pay it back or pay it forward:

1. Thank people for retweeting your content
2. Send a direct message to follow up on a previous interaction
3. Start a new conversation (either publicly with @ or privately with a direct message – DM) about something they’ve said recently on Twitter
4. Retweet their content as a thank-you
5. Comment on something they’ve said
6. Add them to your public lists – this makes people feel valued and part of a more personal social network

The whole point here it to maintain relationships and hopefully take them to a higher level. Social success is all about finding the right mixture of mavens (that sell your virtues to others), and connectors (that have a large and important network) and then giving back as much as you can to keep the social circle of life going. (Don’t know about you, but writing that made me think of the Lion King).

At the end of the day you get back what you put in.

My advice is strive to put more in than what you take out. After all it’s all about Karma.

Repeat Weekly

Try to repeat this process every week or so (determine your own timeline based on how much social interaction you get on Twitter).

Told you it was simple…

— Oli Gardner