How To Find People To Follow On Twitter
Lists are my preferred way to find people to follow. If someone I follow is on a list called, say, Google Employees, I can browse the other Twitter users on that list and add them if they look interesting. But thats the slow, manual way to use lists, and there are a number of tools that make it even easier. I mentioned Twitters Suggested Users earlier its the official recommendations divided into about 20 categories.
But you might also try Listorious, a search engine for Twitter Lists. If youre looking for funny people to follow, maybe to make your morning workout more enjoyable, you can search for [comedy] and get back dozens of Twitter lists related to comedy. If youre looking to connect with news reporters on Twitter, you can browse the [journalists] tag to see lists of reporters that other Twitter users have created.
Those arent your only list-based options. Twibes lets users build topical lists of Twitter users, and then (if I understand correctly) only shows tweets from those users that are specific to the topic. So, if Im in the SEO twibe but send out a tweet about the Seattle Seahawks, it wont show up in the SEO twibes stream.
Twitter Directories
The Most Folllowers tab is self-explanatory; Most Influential appears to not only reflect follower counts, but also things like how often a user is retweeted.
There are a number of additional Twitter directories that might be good places to find Twitter accounts worth following. Try these:
Twellow, which bills itself as the Twitter Yellow Pages
ExecTweets, a directory of business executives on Twitter
TweetFind
Twitter Moms Network
Twitter Recommendation Engines
Mr. Tweet is a recommendation engine that relies on your contacts votes and also offers communities (like a directory) based on topical interests. Itll show you friends of friends and tell you a little about the recommendations, like how many times your friends have retweeted them, how many followers and friends they have, and more.
Mr. Tweet also asks you to give public recommendations of the people you already follow and invites you to tweet about your influence as a Twitter user.
Here are several other Twitter recommendation engines that are worth checking out to find good users for following:
Who Should I Follow? scans your current list of friends and makes recommendations of users youre not following that are similar.
Twiangulate is similar to Who Should I Follow?, but lets you discover who up to three other users follow in common. So, for example, you could use this to see who Danny Sullivan, Barry Schwartz, and Greg Sterling follow on a common basis.
HiveMind does the same thing, but you can supply up to five users and itll tell you who theyre following in common.
Twitter Search Engines
Tweepi is a new tool that lets you search and browse the followers of other users. Heres a screenshot showing some of Barry Schwartzs followers:
Twitters Advanced Search tool offers a variety of ways to slice and dice users and their tweets, but the site also offers a few more specific user search options:
Twitters Account Search helps you find people or companies you know are on Twitter.
If youre not sure if someone is already on Twitter, Twitters Friend Finder lets you locate contacts from Gmail, Yahoo, or AOL who have Twitter accounts.
If youre looking for someone who doesnt have an account, you can invite them via email.
TweepML is a tool that lets you create and share lists of Twitter users, but it also offers a search engine and directory of popular lists, too. @JaredHuber says he does hashtag searches to find users worth following, then he uses TweepML to bulk-follow them.
Finally, HashTweeps lets you search Twitter users by how often they use hashtags.
Local Twitter Users
There are several tools available that make it easy to find Twitter users in your local area (or in any local area).
ChirpCity and Nearby Tweets are two additional local Twitter search engines. Both search tweets in a given area, and both have additional keyword search options so you can find people tweeting about cars or movies in your hometown, for example.
Twitters Advanced Search also lets you search for tweets in a given location, and you can combine that with other options like keyword search, usernames, and so forth.
All of these can be powerful tools for a small/local business thats looking to connect with Twitter users in its hometown.
Final Thoughts
Source: searchengineland.com