1. Twitter Lists

Twitter Lists are changing the game. We recently looked at several reasons why, but also consider that with the Lists gadget, your tweets may appear all over the web if you can get onto lists. They will appear on sites and blogs, which are more than likely going to be related to the niche you are in anyway if you have the right audience on Twitter.

2. The Openness of Twitter

The openness of Twitter, social media and the web in general, pretty much means that your messages on Twitter won’t be limited to your Twitter audience. Facebook and other social networks will bring tweets in. People will share them, screenshot them, link to them on blogs, etc. Twitter is a means of getting your message out to more people, but it’s not necessarily only the people on Twitter that will see those messages.

3. Building Valuable Relationships

Laura Fitton, the author of Twitter for Dummies, chalks up success on Twitter to four basic concepts: listen, learn, care, and serve. Basically, if you listen to the community, you will learn, and if you show that you care, you are more likely to get more out of your efforts. Serving means providing something of use to the community. If you what you’re not doing that, you may be setting yourself up to fail, as Fitton talked about in this interview with WebProNews.

4. Traffic That Cares

Twitter can bring you not only random traffic, but traffic from people who are actually passionate about the niche that you are a part of. Retweets are huge in this regard. Guy Kawasaki calls retweeting the sincerest form of flattery. He has a point. He notes that people are willing to risk their reputations by retweeting your content.

5. Staying Current

Being found in Twitter searches (not to mention real time search in general, which is starting to become a main area of focus for all of the big search engines, not to mention all of the standalone real-time search sites) provides a lot of opportunity for exposure. We discussed this here and gave tips for getting found in real-time searches.

6. Connecting with Local Customers

There are a variety of ways you can connect with local consumers and customers using Twitter and Twitter-related tools. There are tools like our own TwellowHood, which let you find Twitterers in your area, for example. Another thing to keep an eye on is Google’s new Social Search. It’s currently just a lab experiment, but could become more. It certainly has potential.

A recent Search Engine Land article made some good points about the potential of local marketing with this tool, which delivers Google search results based on the communities you are a part of. It draws from Google profiles, which include the networks that people are connected to (based on what any person includes in that profile). If you’re not familiar with this feature, watch the following clip, and you’ll understand.

7. Going International and Multi-lingual

Twitter is expanding into more languages. If you thought Twitter was important to marketing already, consider that for most of its existence, it has only been available in a couple of languages. Now it’s in Spanish, and many more languages will follow. That’s not only going to be huge for international and multi-lingual marketing efforts, it’s going to be huge for Twitter’s growth, and the more Twitter grows, the more potential customers are out there.

8. It’s Still Young

Consider that Twitter is just getting started in the grand scheme of things. It’s still young. There are no doubt going to be a lot more features added in the future. And don’t forget about the thousands of Twitter apps that are already out there that can make Twitter useful in different ways to different people and businesses. Take some time and explore them. Fitton’s site OneForty.com, which is like Yelp for Twitter apps, is pretty good for that. It has reviews, and people tell why certain helps have helped their businesses.

Did we leave some reasons out? Please share with the rest of us.

Related Articles:

> 6 Ways Twitter Lists Are Changing the Game

> By Tweeting, You Could Appear All Over the Web

> Twitter Expands the "Lists" Feature

> Microsoft and Google Score Deals with Twitter

(Coverage of the BlogWorld conference continues at WebProNews Videos.  Keep an eye on WebProNews for more notes and videos from the event this week.)

If that 11-letter term threw you, refer to Umair Haque’s "Awesomeness Manifesto."  It’s a short piece that recently made the rounds on Twitter and tends to complement Fitton’s views.

Anyway, Fitton said, "Awesomeness should not be a private street."  She encouraged listeners to "figure out your passion and go out there and do it," which is a nice message.  Then she got into some specifics.

Part of success, according to Fitton, is luck.  But she thinks that "you can learn to be lucky."  Otherwise, it’s all about belief and connecting, and Twitter – which Fitton likened to a superpower – is key to that last step.

Fitton said it’s important to remember that ordinary, everyday people can use Twitter, and so you shouldn’t be afraid to be yourself on the site.  She also recommended listening, learning, caring, and serving on Twitter.  "Influence is providing attention and value to others," Fitton stressed.

As for the benefits, besides becoming awesome and building a brand, Fitton feels that using Twitter can make you a better and happier person.

WebProNews Video reporter Abby Johnson contributed to this report.

(WebProNews spent the weekend in Vegas at the BlogWorld Expo and chatted up the brightest minds in the blogging business. Stay tuned to WebProNews and WebProNews Video for updates.)

For a little background, Robert Scoble is most famous for his blog Scobleizer, and is also currently a video blogger for Fast Company. Doc Searls is Senior Editor of Linux Journal, co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto, and one of the world’s best-known bloggers. Laura Fitton is the CEO of Pistachio Consulting Inc., the first social media agency dedicated to business use of microblogging.

Scoble discussed Twitter as a news-stream. Mobile devices make it possible to have news anywhere, as he noted, but this doesn’t mean that Twitter should be the news. It just shows the impact, he says. Fitton says that some traditional media outlets are starting to "get it."

"Your friends are your content on theses sites," she says. "RSS micro widgets are going to dramatically change how the news is going to be delivered." Searls then discussed the static web vs. the live web (sites like Twitter).

Fitton believes that "citizen journalism" is not defined properly, and that it should be more like "citizen observation" or something. Of course, Searls and Scoble disagree with this notion because they believe journalists misrepresent interviews anyway. For example, they might represent a two-hour interview with a 10 second clip. A Q&A session took place next, but this was mostly just people asking Scoble if he would put them on his site.

One final note came from Fitton, who says that a society that has been based on control and privacy is going to have to change. It’s hard to disagree with that has everything seems to become more transparent by the day.

WebProNews anchor Abby Prince-Johnson contributed to this article.