Now you’re on twitter (right?!) but how do you really find more people to follow? How do you find people that you would actually be interested in following?
Here are a few ways to find people who might be interesting to you. (If you’re unsure if you should follow them, click on their name and try to get a sense based on their tweets and profile information if they’d be a good fit or not.)
Lists
Lists are a way to filter your twitter content. People can create their own lists of their followers and separate them by “category”. A great way to find new people to follow is to look and see what lists someone you already like to follow is on, and see if there are other people on that list that are similar.
To see what lists someone is on, go to their twitter page and select the lists tab (far right from timeline) and select “lists following”. Here is a list of the lists I’m on, in case you want to have a look. And here are a few other lists to check out, some on Ottawa , and some on parenting. You can follow the lists but if you want to see these bloggers in your regular stream you will also have to individually add the people.
Search
There is a search bar at the top of Twitter. If you search in terms for things that you’re interested in tweets about those topics will come up. Some of those people may be of interest. You can also use several words to try to narrow things down.
Friends
I often add people that people I follow mention in their tweets, or sometimes I just browse the people that they follow on their twitter page looking for people that might have similar interests. Follow Friday (often written as #FF) is something many people do on Fridays, taking the time to suggest some of the people that they follow - start following some of them.
There are lots of ways to find people to follow on twitter. In my experience in can snowball all of a sudden (I follow almost two thousand people). The more you interact with people, the more people will start to follow you. In the beginning, I followed everyone who followed me (I don’t do that anymore) - although beware of spam followers (they will have many less followers than people they are following and their tweets won’t really make sense). And tweet me if you have any questions! :)
Or use our fancy new “tweet this post” icon right below this post and share it with all your new twitter friends!
See you on twitter!