Twitter communities

Image via CrunchBase

Some social media outlets foster a sense of a smaller communities among its members, with LinkedIn connections or even Facebook Groups. Twitter seems less oriented to forming smaller communities around any concept except who you follow and who your followers are. I traded e-mails recently with Kent Huffman, who has taken to creating and maintaining several marketing-related lists of Twitter users. They almost feel like a Facebook group that you need to qualify for, rather than join.

Kent decided to make lists of the top CMOs, marketing professors, and marketing book authors active on Twitter. Kent explained to me that he compiled the lists through online searches for “CMO,” “Chief Marketing Officer,” “marketing book author,” and “marketing professor.” He searched his 5,000+ followers on Twitter, used TweepSearch.com to find bios on Twitter, and used the Twitter search.
At that point, Kent says, “Once I posted and then tweeted about the lists, other Twitter users suggested additions (on behalf of themselves or others), which is why I update them every two weeks. So the lists are very fluid in nature, as they grow and change along with the Twitterers featured.”
Kent shows the lists in order of the number of Twitter followers, and I asked him if he thought the number of followers indicated anything significant about the authors, for example. Kent had a quick answer: “I don’t think that the authors toward the top of the list are better than the others toward the bottom, as the number of people who follow each of those authors can be affected by how long that author has been tweeting, how interesting his/her tweets are, how aggressive he/she is with the marketing process on Twitter, and a number of other factors. However, I had to publish the lists in some type of order and decided that organizing them by the number of followers would be somewhat logical, as it would at least be an indication of the number of people on Twitter who wanted to know what that person had to say.”
This is clearly an experiment on Kent’s part and I find the whole idea interesting, much like services like TwitterGrader rank all Twitter users on a number of factors. Kent updates the lists frequently and he uses Twitter to tell his followers who’s on the new list each time.
Kent says that he plans to “add a few more new lists in the coming weeks and months–all connected in some way to the core subject of marketing.” So my question is, “Is this a form of community building?” Can we use Twitter to build communities in this way?