Many of us probably have more tweets coming through in any given day than we are able to keep up with. In comes Twitter Lists which are Twitter’s long awaited “groups” features.

Twitter Lists enables you to segment your followers into groups so that it makes it easier at a glance for you to follow what they’re up to. Twitter Lists aren’t just static listings of users, but live streams of the latest tweets from a specified set of users.

Let’s say you’re into photography. You could create a list around your followers who tweet about photography and that would give you a snapshot of the things they are saying by viewing that list’s page. List’s even allow you to organize people that you’re not following.

Below are some reasons for creating lists:

Group Creation – You could use Lists to organize your tweeps into groups based on anything you want.

Recommend Followers – You could create a public list of followers that you think are worth following. Anyone can view this list and follow the people on it or the entire list if they like.

Follow people who are following you – When you follow a Twitter List you are not following each individual user, but rather the entire list. Tweets within this Twitter List aren’t posted to your main stream. You can visit that list and view its stream. This is especially useful if these people tweet too often and you want to segment them out of your main Twitter stream.

Types of lists:

Public Lists – This list can be seen by anyone and anyone can follow them. They are great for lists of recommended follows.

Private Lists – Only the creator of the list will be able to view and subscribe to them. This is great for lists of competitors that you would like to monitor but not make public. Private lists are identified by a small “closed lock” icon.

Once you find a list you want to follow either through people you follow, third-party sites like Listorious or TweetMeme Lists, just click on the “Follow This List” button. You can unfollow a list from the same page by clicking the “Unfollow” link.

You can find out how many lists you are on by clicking on the “Listed” link on your profile that appears next to your follower and following numbers. It will bring up two tabs: one that shows the list you are following/made, and one that are following you.

If you find yourself on a list that you don’t want to be on, you can remove yourself from that list by blocking its creator. Bear in mind that when you block a person on Twitter that person can no longer follow you. Blocking is reversible and can be undone.

At the beginning of June 2010, Google officially launched Caffeine, their new super fast indexing platform. They have been testing it for the past year and claim that with the upgrades to their spiders and other indexing tools, more websites will be indexed and faster meaning fresher content and more relevant search results. So what does this mean for the hotel and resort industry and what can you do to take advantage of Caffeine?

The whole concept of Caffeine is based around bringing more relevant organic search results to the searcher. Decreased website indexing times means hotel internet marketing professionals can now develop and test pages of their websites and see results in search engine results positions far quicker. The launch of Caffeine will push hotel and resort marketing professionals and agencies to really think about the content and structure of their websites rather than just booking rooms via the web.  With the combination of the newly launched Universal Search layout and ‘Caffeine’, in order to remain competitive, a hotel or resort will now have to develop multiple facets of digital marketing in addition to taking care of their property websites. Items such as social media, online video, proactive involvement in review sites and tackling online PR efforts will become common place. We know from research that consumers want to watch an online video and read what others are saying about a hotel or resort before they spend their hard earned money. Caffeine and universal search combined will now allow a consumer to get a much more diverse picture of a hotel or resort before they even visit a property’s website. This makes SEO obsolete and Universal SEO comes into play. To ensure your resort or hotel internet marketing strategy is getting its jolt of Caffeine, make sure you get a cup of Fog Lifter in the morning and start thinking about updating your hotel internet search marketing plans. Fast.