Towards the end of my Social Media in the Real World course, led by the amazing Jennifer Neeley as part of SFSU’s social media marketing certificate program, I had a couple of my classmates come up to me and ask how I went about finding interesting marketing folks to follow on twitter.
As we talked, I realized that it seems to be a pretty daunting task to folks just starting out to find other link-minded tweeps (twitter peeps) to follow. Thus, I shared these simple ways to get started, that don’t involve a big time sink or any specialized knowledge of twitter.
1. Start with the people you know.
Chances are, a number of your friends and colleagues are already on twitter — so seek them out and start following them. If they don’t have their twitter handles in their email signatures or on their business cards just ask them. When you’re reading blog posts from sites you enjoy reading, look fo the little blue t twitter button and start following them too.
2. Take a look at who they follow.
Yes, some folks seem to follow the entire Twitterverse. But your typical user follows only the people whose tweets they find to be worthwhile. So start looking at the last 10 people the people on your follow list have added. And whom are they retweeting? These are good indicators of active, engaging twitter feeds to keep an eye on.
3. Look at the Lists in which they’re included.
Do you see that pulldown menu for Lists in the screenshot? That’s from the twitter web client. It’s showing all the lists I’ve created, the lists created by others that I follow, and a link to go to the list of lists that are following me. So if you’re following me because you want to know more about foodie happenings around San Francisco, you can see that I have a number of lists full of folks who are tweeting on those topics.
I know it can seem overwhelming to jump into twitter at this point. But look at it this way instead: there are probably plenty of folks you know who have already done some of the legwork for you.
Leave a Reply