5 Tips on Finding Interesting People to Follow on Twitter

Joining Twitter is pretty useless if you’re not connected to anyone. During the few weeks I’ve been on Twitter, I’ve found that it has become a lot more interesting and useful once I found some cool people to follow. Here are some tips on how to find interesting people on Twitter:

1. Follow people you already know- It’s seems obvious, but some of the first people you follow should be the people that you already know. If you’re using an email service like Yahoo!, Gmail, Hotmail, AOL, or MSN, you can allow Twitter to search your address book to see if any of your contacts already has an account. It also allows you to send an email invitation to people from your address book to join Twitter if they don’t already have a Twitter account.

2. Browse the followers of your followers- If you already have people following you, visit the profiles of your current followers and see who’s following them. Chances are that you may find potential followers that have the same interests as you.

3. Don’t follow indescriminately- Try to find people that have the same interests as you. Twitter is as much about monitoring as it is about sending updates. You want the people that you’re following to be talking about things of interest to you. So choose the people you follow carefully. Before you hit “follow” button, check out that person’s previous tweets. What were they about? Are they entirely self-serving, are they just talking about what they last fed their cat, or do they provide some interesting information as well? Because of the nature of Twitter, you will get a certain amount of “chatter” that you may not be interested in, but some of the most interesting people to follow will balance that with something useful.

It’s also a good idea to look at the volume and frequency of a person’s tweets as well. How often do they tweet? When was their last tweet? If it was a month or two ago…they might not make an interesting person to follow. By the same token, you may not have the time to follow someone who tweets about something insignificant every 10 minutes throughout the day.

Now, what if you’re using Twitter as a means to promote yourself and/or maybe to bring more traffic to your website? Wouldn’t you want to include more people and not less? Not necessarily. Not everyone will be interested in what you do, so gathering a huge group of followers that won’t eventually visit your website is just a waste of time. It’s just like I stated in my series on marketing through social networking, you’ll get better results if you concentrate on people that’s likely to be interested in what you’re offering. So do a bit of research before you start following.

4. Follow those who follow you…within reason- On Twitter, it’s usually good form to follow the people that’s following you. But be careful! There are some that try to use this common courtesy as a means to gather large numbers of followers so they can spam them with unwelcome commercial messages. Again, don’t be indescriminate when it comes to following people on Twitter…it’s okay not to follow someone if they seem to be trying to spam you.

5. Use the search function to find followers- Twitter has a search engine that allows you to search profiles and tweets. So if you type in the word “art” you’ll find all of those Twitter profiles, usernames, and tweets that contain the word “art”. Be aware that this is a kind of scattergun approach to finding followers, but it can be a good way to start if you’re at ground zero.

There’s also a interesting service called Summize that allows you to search Twitter conversations. If you type in the word “crafts” you’ll get all of the Twitter conversations that contain the word “crafts”. I actually like this service a bit better than the Twitter search.

So if you haven’t checked out Twitter yet, you can go to the Twitter website…and if you sign up for an account and need someone to follow, check out my Twitter profile and follow me!