MacMost launches a new Mac Users Guide to Twitter section. In this video, if you are new to Twitter, find out how to find interesting people to follow to make your Twitter experience better.
On today’s episode lets take a look at how you can find people to follow on Twitter. We’ve just launched a new section of MacMost.com, its a guide to twitter. You can go there and found out how you can use Twitter, how to find followers, how to get people to follow you and find reviews of Mac Twitter applications and link to iPhone Twitter applications. If your new to Twitter, your first problem is finding people to follow. Now these people fall into a couple of categories. The first one is the most obvious one, its your friends. Find out which of your friends are on Twitter and follow them. You can send out an email to all of your friends or just ask around. Now beyond friends are what I like to call connections. Connections are business associates maybe people you work with or people that you’ve met throughout your career. You can go ahead and look through your address book and see if any of them are on Twitter. You can go and look at their blogs maybe look at their personal home pages and see if they list a Twitter address. Maybe email some of them if you know some of them well enough. You can also go ahead and search the internet or search Twitter for their names. After connections, there’s a group I like to call leaders. These are people that are in your field or have a similar interest to you, but are leaders in that field. They’re usually people that have a lot of followers. You can go ahead and search the internet for people who have blogs. Maybe you already follow them through RSS feeds or just by reading their website everyday. You can go ahead and see if they’ve got Twitter addresses and usually they’ll tweet some interesting things about topics your interested in. Related to that in a way are companies so these are people tweeting from companies maybe companies you do business with or companies that your fans of. It could just be a company that you have a lot to do with. For instance if you fly the same airline all the time, maybe the cable provider you have or the telecommunications provider you use at home has somebody that is on Twitter. You can go ahead and find these people and go ahead and subscribe to them. Usually you can find out about new services or offers from companies that you use this way. This also gives you a good way to send a message to somebody at a company that you use. a lot of times that is more effective than going through customer support as their social media expert who is on Twitter can sometimes help you where regular customer support can’t. Now a lot of people like to use Twitter to follow celebrities. So if your fans of artists or actors, you can go ahead and search for them and see if they are on Twitter. A lot of times its easiest to actually just search for the name of the person followed by the word Twitter and you will find maybe a blog post by somebody else that says hey, “Did you know this celebrity is on Twitter? Here’s their address.” That’s sometimes the easiest way to find them on Twitter. Now you have to be weary sometimes its the real person tweeting, sometimes its a hired assistant tweeting and sometimes its somebody that’s not even associated with them that’s tweeting. So you want to maybe do some more research by doing some more searching around to find out if that Twitter address is the real thing. Another good source of people to follow on Twitter are news organizations. You can follow most news organizations all the way from the big cable news networks all the way down to your local newspapers. A lot of them have people that tweet or they automatically tweet their recent headlines so you can actually keep up with the news locally, nationally and internationally using Twitter. The last category will just be random people, people that maybe share a similar interest or maybe you find humorous or interesting. One of the ways you can find these people of course by looking at the tweets that come in from your friends and seeing when they retweet something somebody else says. Go and check out that persons profile and if they seem interesting follow them. You can always unfollow them later so it really is no harm in just trying. You can also go ahead and just search Twitter for terms that you are interested in, or you can actually go ahead and look at the trends on Twitter. These are all links at the bottom of the main Twitter home page and you can see if there is any interesting trends going on and people discussing something, and if you find somebody saying something that you like or find funny or interesting you can go ahead and follow them as well. So that’s a brief look on how to find people to follow on Twitter. Especially helpful if you are new to Twitter. Also check out our entire section the Mac Users Guide to Twitter where you find more articles and reviews, and you can also follow me I’m @rosenz. Till next time, I’m this is Gary Rosenzweig with MacMost Now.
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Become a fan of MacMost on Facebook.“People” you follow on Twitter fall into several categories. Most Twitter users have a few of each. Lets look at each one and see how you can find more people to follow.
Friends: Actual friends should be your first priority on Twitter. Finding them can be hard, and sometimes it is simply best to contact each of your friends directly to ask them for their Twitter id. Once you know it, just go to http://twitter.com/(your friend’s id) to find them and click the Follow button. You can also use the search link at the bottom of Twitter to try to search for them, but it doesn’t work well if they have a common name, or if they have declined to give their real name when signing up for an account.
Connections: Not necessarily friends, but people you know who work in your industry. Many people will tweet about their work or area of expertise, so Twitter can be a great way to stay on top of things going on in your field if you follow the right people. You would usually find these connections by meeting people at business meetings and conferences. You could also search Twitter for terms relating to your field and look out for people who have recently tweeted about the topic.
Leaders: These are people who are the leaders in your field or area of interest. They usually have tons of followers and tweet often. The may or may not follow people back, but rarely read their tweets if they do. It is a good idea to find these people and follow them. If you already know the names of these people, try searching to see if they are on Twitter. Sometimes if you visit their Web sites you will see a Twitter address listed as well.
Celebrities: Many celebrities (actors, authors, politicians, etc) tweet about things going on in their lives. If you are a fan, you may enjoy following them. Usually a Google search for the celebrities name and “Twitter” will find a reference to their Twitter ID and perhaps some insight as to whether they write the tweets themselves, or have assistants do it for them.
Companies: If you are a fan of a company and/or its products, you may want to follow them on Twitter. Even if you are not a fan, but find that you use the company’s products or services, following on Twitter may be useful. And if you find you need to make a comment or compliant, Twitter might be a far better way to do it as it might get action quicker than normal channels. Companies usually monitor Twitter for mentions of their company names. They may not post their Twitter ID on their marketing-department-controlled site. A Google search for “company name Twitter” will usually get you the ID.
News Sources: If you are checking Twitter every few minutes to see what your friends, connections, leaders, celebrities and companies are doing, when why not get your news that way too. Most major news organizations, and many local ones, post headlines to Twitter. You may find Twitter makes you the first to know when news happens. Check their Web sites for Twitter IDs.
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