Finding Friends on Twitter
One of the most common questions I get about the social network Twitter is, “How do I know who to follow?” The answer to this question depends greatly on what your goals are. For instance recently my business partners and I launched a Nascar related project and we setup a twitter account to help us marketing this project. Naturally we wanted to follow only people with a similar interest in Nascar as a topic. I used several tools that I will outline below to build our network inside of Twitter.
One of the best tools for finding people to follow is Twitter search. Twitter has it’s own search engine that allows you to look for words used in recent tweets. The results come back to you in chronological order. For instance, here’s a link to the Twitter search for “Nascar”. Once you have entered in your search term(s) and pulled up the list of recent tweets, you can click on the names of those Twitter users who posted the tweets and follow them. In a lot of cases these members will follow you back, this is totally up to the user though, and some do not follow back no matter how hard you try.
Another method to adding followers is to locate users who have similar interests or goals to you and browse their followers, or who they follow and add these users to follow. Again, you will pick up some follow backs by doing this, and some users will not follow, it’s entirely up to the user.
There are some other good tools for locating twitterers to follow as well such as Twittergrid.com. Here’s a link to the Twittergrid Results for the keyword “Nascar”. The object, of course, is to pick up as many followers to your Twitter feed that you possibly can but not too many that you can’t possibly stay in touch with your followers.
