One of the entries in your Social Media Strategy, under the section labelled Twitter metrics,  will most likely be the entry “How many people am I following?“  So, this post is an introduction to finding friends to follow on Twitter.

I’ll be covering in part 1:

• Twitter Tags
• Monitoring sites e.g. Monitter
• Googlelabs Follow finder
• Twitter Lists
• Google Custom searches – including time-lines

First let’s clarify the distinction between the Twitter terms: Followers, and Following – two of the most prominent metrics reported directly on your Twitter home page.

A Follower is somebody that has chosen to follow you.  They have visited your website, your blog, or received an email or newsletter from you that included a link to your Twitter  account.  They’ve then elected to follow your Tweets.  Essentially, these are your friends.  Your Tweets appear in their Twitter stream – listed on their Twitter Home Page.  Critically, for these followers, your tweets are separate from the “noisy” Twitter Public time-line …!

Whilst the people, or organisations, that you are Following appear in your Home page – your twitter steam.  It’s this latter group that we’ll be focusing on in this post.

So how might you go about systematically finding people to follow?

#Tags

I’m sure you’ve already come across a hashtag. It’s a tweet that includes a term prefixed with #  – i.e. the hash symbol, hence the term hashtag.  For example, #ashtag (get it: hashtag!) is currently (April 2010) included in tweets discussing the volcanic ash from Iceland that is affecting air travel in North Western Europe.

Search on a hashtag will provide you with people that you might want to follow.   Firstly then some example hashtags:

a) the use of the #nonprofit hashtag (and #ngo, and ‘humanrights) by Timo Luege of @Sm4good:

Social media case studies for non-profit organizations: http://bit.ly/cW06kf #ngo #nonprofit #humanrights

b) the use of #CharityTuesday hashtag by Sheila Britton of @sheb57:

#charitytuesday Check out @Nomads_land, solo walking entire British coastline (7000miles) for charity ……amazing !! :-)

c) alternatively you might follow a hashtag used for a particular #{Event}:

For example the use of an #{Event} hashtag in a Tweet by Amnesty International for their 2010 AGM:

Today is the last day to register online for #agm10! We’ll be tweeting from the event @AmnestyAGM

So find a relevant (to your Strategy!) hashtag, search for it regularly, and you should a find possible Tweeps that will be worth your while following.

Lost for that hashtag?  To find a hashtag you could use http://hashtags.org/, or if there some current event (that is relevant to your organisation or strategy) that is being followed in the media then it’s most likely a trending topic in Twitter.  See, for example: http://www.whatthetrend.com/.  But be aware that not everybody is familiar with, or regularly uses or consistently uses, hashtags.  Take, for example, the term nonprofit.  It might appear with, or without, the prefix # – see http://trendistic.com/nonprofit

Twitter monitoring sites

There’s a proliferation of sites that enable you to monitor Twitter – and the growth in monitoring sites is unlikely to abate.  One you might like to explore is Monitter (“Simple. It’s a twitter monitor, it lets you “monitter” the twitter world for a set of keywords and watch what people are saying“).  With Monitter you can view several columns of Twitter streams each filter by a keyword, or phrase.

So, for example, you good track the terms: “social media”, and “#socialmedia” …

Monitter: Social Media & #socialmedia Twitter streams

Again, your objective is to identify a user in these streams that’s worth you following.

Googlelabs: Follow finder

Google, once again, comes to your rescue!

Google now offers, with classic Google stark  simplicity,  a Follow finder site: http://www.followfinder.googlelabs.com/

For example, entering the Twitter username salesforce (i.e. a username that aligns with your criteria of somebody you would follow, or are following) Follow finder produces two columns of Tweeps …

One column of “Tweeps you might like” to follow e.g. @gartner_inc, @forrester, … . And, a separate column of “Tweeps with similar followers” e.g. @salesforcedocs, @forcedotcom, …

You can obviously have endless fun with this site and completely exhaust your Twitter quota for the day entering Twitter usernames; checking bio’s (the short Twitter biography that many users complete), and some of their current tweets to see if they align with your strategy … to see if they’re worth following.

(Note: the @ prefix is to identify a username, and is used when replying to the user.  It’s also a mention … easy in’it -see Twitter Help)

Similarly, as your count of Followers grows, you’ll need to return Follow finder to continue to extend your reach.

Twitter Lists

Late last year (November 2009) Twitter launched Twitter Lists: “… a new way to organize the people you’re following on Twitter, or find new people.“  A Twitter List enables you to group together users on Twitter into lists  so that you see a curated Twitter stream of their tweets.  Better still, Twitter allow you to include people in your lists that you’re not following …  See the excellent Mashable (“… the world’s largest blog focused exclusively on Web 2.0 and Social Media news“) guide: HOW TO: Use Twitter Lists

Obviously you can create you own list (see: Twitter’s How To Use Twitter Lists), alternatively you can capture somebody else’s List.  An example is Listorious (“The definitive list of who matters on Twitter“) website where there are two routes: Lists and Tags.  For example below: “Charity Lists”, and the Top Tag’s page:

Listorious: Charity list

Listorious: Top Tags

Following a relevant list from your Twitter account will enable you to identify new Tweeps to follow.  Similarly, with the Top Tags, you can choose to follow, for example, top Social Media Lists:

Clicking the Listorious “FOLLOW” link copies the SOMEECARDS list to your Twitter Home page …

Twitter Lists are a very powerful tool directly available from your Twitter home page.  The other great opportunity of Lists is that they can be used to filter your Twitter stream – so that with different Lists, for example, you can focus your communications.  Better still, if you’re not the owner (the “curator”) of the list, you may find additional relevant users are being added to the list for you i.e. return frequently to your Twitter Lists.

Google Custom searches

Twitter has a very good Advanced Search page – but Google provides two (at least!) very powerful search tools that should be included in your Twitter Metrics portfolio.  One of these is Google’s Custom Search Engine.  With this tool you can create your own search pages that exclusively searches only web sites you’ve named.  The “Twitter.com” site, say! You can then also apply specific Search engine keywords that further filter the results.

The other Google tool is the Time-line feature available on the “standard” Google search results page:

Google Search: Ash - click on "Show options ..."

Google Search: Ash - Options enabled. Click on "Updates" then "April"

Google Search: Ash - Time-line for April

Observe that, for this time-line, there’s little traffic including the term “ash” before 15th April, and that all the returned results are from Twitter!

End of part 1

The concluding part of this Post can be found here …