Favorites are a much underused Twitter feature. And if you get creative, they can provide you with much more than a way to store your favorite tweets.

The technique that I’m about to describe provides a great way to make sure that your followers pay close attention to your future tweets.

Post a message to your followers asking them to send you their favorite tweets. But put a limit on the submissions, such as the first 20, within 24 hours or before a certain date and time. For example;

Send your top tweets. The best will appear on my FAVs page. First 20 only. Post: @powersystem Fav tweet + Static Twitter Page URL

Only accept tweets for consideration if they are submitted within the timeframe that you stipulate. This creates an element of scarcity or urgency.

If you want to provide your followers with more instructions and outline the benefits of participating, you could create a page on your website/blog with all the instructions, then link to the page whenever you request more favorites.

For example;

Send your top tweets. Best will appear on my FAVs page. Rules http://is.gd/xxxxx Post: @powersystem Fav tweet + Static Twitter Page URL

After the time limit has passed, select the best posts and add them to your favorites (click the start icon to the right of the messages that you want to select).

To obtain the maximum benefit, you should repeat these steps every week or month, but don’t make it too predictable. The aim is to make your followers read your posts waiting for another opportunity to submit their favorite tweets.

Then it’s just a case of promoting your Twitter favorites page as much as possible. All the normal promotion methods are available, however, it’s also possible to increase the reach of your favorites page by linking the RSS feed to your other sites and social media pages.

The RSS feed for your Twitter favorites takes the following format; http://twitter.com/favorites/USERNAME.rss for example, the RSS feed for the Twitter Power Team can be found at; http://twitter.com/favorites/powersystem.rss

Ultimately, the more popular your favorites page, the more eager your followers will be to win one of your contests. To make your offer ever more attractive, you could also offer to Retweet the best messages to your followers.

Let us know whether you use the favorites feature on Twitter, and if you do, how do you use it? Is there a better way to use the favorites list?