If you’ve just signed up for a Twitter account for yourself or for your business, figuring out who to follow can seem daunting. Aside from friends or customers who are already on the service and businesses you patronize or partner with, it’s not immediately obvious who’s worth adding to your Twitter stream. So, here are four tips to get you started:
Create Social Searches
First and foremost, run social searches on the subjects surrounding your brand or product, your market, and the communities you serve. This is an ideal place to find individuals and organizations to follow. And, while you’re at it, be sure to try following “conversation trails” (see our previous post on finding relevant social conversations). If one person or company tweets about something of interest, search for anyone who retweets that message. And if a link to a blog post arrives in your stream, check the comments section and see if there are any people leaving comments who seem worth following up with.
Find Recommendations
If you have contacts who are well established on Twitter, visit their profile pages and check out any Twitter lists they’ve created. This is especially useful for those individuals or companies who are following a lot of people and who aren’t likely to remember every name worth mentioning when you’re asking them for suggestions over a drink or a cup of coffee.
If there are just too many lists to plow through, consider checking out the Mr. Tweet service. It suggests users for you to follow, based on the people and companies you’re already following.
Follow Local Users
Services like Twellow, Localtweeps, and Twitter Local can help you uncover Twitter users in your area who you are not already connected to. When I began to consciously expand my network in the spring of 2008, Twitter Local was one of the places I spent a lot of time, and here’s why: I was much more likely to bump into a local user in the real world, and real world interactions were a primary goal for me as an author and self-publisher/distributor. As I’ve written before, I believe translating online relationships into real world transactions should be a primary goal of any social media marketing campaign. So, get local!
Manage Your List
Services like Manage Twitter and Friend or Follow are springing up to help those of us whose Twitter streams have grown out of control. Both services allow you to easily see which of the folks you’re following aren’t following you, which followers of yours you aren’t following, and more.
But, while a service like Manage Twitter can be useful, it doesn’t offer the kind of rich contact information that an integrated marketing platform can. Maybe there’s a reason you aren’t following @So-and-So anymore. Manage Twitter can’t tell you why, but a system tied to an intelligent contact database (like JitterJam) might shed a bit more light on the subject.
Got any tips on who to follow on Twitter? Please leave a comment below and let us know.
