So, who are you following on Twitter? I mean really following? Do you have a list only of people you know or is it mixed between real personal contacts and complete strangers?
My guess is you’re like most people using Twitter and you have a mixed list. Maybe your following Darren Rowse and Yaro Starak. Maybe you’re following me. It’s hard not to have one or two curiosity follows. So, the next question is why are you following strangers on Twitter? Do you expect them to say something interesting or do you think they will one day be your close friend? Again my guess is your like most people and you don’t know. Let’s come back to this in a moment.
What if you don’t know who to follow? Maybe your new to Twitter and you want to follow someone, because that’s what your suppose to do right? But who, who do you follow in a sea of little thumbnail faces and cartoon icons?
Well whether you’re following Steve Jobs for no apparent reason or your looking for someone to follow, you might want to check out the Twitter friend finder tool at Twubble.com.
According to their website, “Twubble can help expand your Twitter bubble—it searches your friend graph and picks out people who you may like to follow.”
This is an interesting way to stalk, er research people to follow on Twitter because it gives you a loose reason to choose those people. Twubble looks at your follow list and tries to match you up with other people you might be interested in following. I’m not sure exactly how they determine who to recommend, but I think it has to do with common friends.
Twubble gives you a list similar to this one and you can choose who you want to follow from there. You can also Google search the person to find out more about them.
There is a transference of trust and an element of social proof that is carried in the list that is returned because Twubble tells you who and how many people are following the people they recommend to you. So six of your friends are following someone, you might want to follow them too.
Personally I see this as a research tool that can lead you to groups of people who are thought leaders in a particular subject.
Let me give you an example of why this might be useful information.
A few days ago I received an email from Twitter telling me that ObamaNews was following me. I didn’t think it too strange because I am following Obama and Hillary on Twitter. But when I eventually went to check out ObamaNews to see if I wanted to follow them I found more of an adsense site than a campaign site. This got me to thinking. Is it possible to follow people just to get them to follow you, or at the very least to visit your blog?
I think the answer is definitely yes. It is possible to find a Twitter group, follow everyone within that group and wait for them to either follow you in return or at least visit your blog to check our who you are.
This might not be your thing and you might see it as underhanded. I’m not debating that point here. What I am saying is that there are unexplored automatic response at work here that are largely untapped on Twitter. But, as people discover this you can bet you’ll see more of it and it will likely make some people a lot of money.
Perspective:
Take some time and evaluate exactly who you’re following on Twitter and honestly ask yourself why you’re following them. If there is a reason fine. If there isn’t a reason fine. Just know that there is more to Twitter than just following strangers for no apparent reason and don’t be surprised when people you don’t know start following you.
Use the tools we’ve discussed so far to find people to follow and look for trends and opportunity in the connections you create. You’ll be amazed at what’s there if you just that the time to look.
Researching,
Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com
Great blog post. I want to also mention a service that i found called:
http://www.twannabe.com
its a great tool to auto generate up to 2000 people that follow a certain person.
- cosmin
http://twitter.com/cosguru
Cosmin, thanks for the interesting reference. I’m a little think, so please tell me why auto generating fake friends will help me long term. I understand the gaming the system aspect of it, but how does that create long term value? If you have another perspective, please let me know. I am interested in the subject, but as I say, I just don’t get it :)
informative blog post.
As I understand, twubble constructs your friend graph, and then recommends the twitter users who are being followed by two or more of your immediate followers. Just as one follows blogs, one would like to follow someone based upon their interests, what they twitter about, and information content of their tweets.
I looked around, and and found this blogpost socialmediavision.com/social-media/twitter-people-search-alternatives that talked about some more twitter search portals. twellow.com is one that I found interesting. It searches bio, name (same as the default twitter search) and location. I am looking at developing something on similar lines. Things that I'd add are :
1. the relevance of keywords provided to the tweets of the user,
2. proportion of useful tweets (information related to the subject) to rants (information that friends and family would like to go through
3. The authority of the person in real world.
Your inputs are appreciated
Thanks!
So Twitter is awesome for Taking traffic to you website . It is very
simple to setup and its a fun positive way to keep in contact with
people. To get more followers on twitter check out this amazing
tool. Twitter Traffic Machine
This website has a good list of people who will likely follow-back, along with good tools and suggestions on how to find users who will follow-back – Twitter Users Who Will Follow You Back dot com
Interesting that you no followed the inks to Darren Rowse and Yaro Starak, is it that you don’t trust their sites. Or that you are hording your google juice, which in reality is a bad thing to do as authority sites do follow their editorial links.
I’m sure it makes those who have a “nofollow” highligher swithed on reluctant to link to you.
Hey Lyndon, I wrote this article about a year and a half ago and I’m not sure what I was thinking about at the time. I certainly trust Darren and Yaro’s information and these days I would have no problems passing link juice to anyone I link to. There was a time when I paid attention to nofollow, but now I don’t really care. Honestly, over time I have found less and less value in keeping up with nofollow links (both on my blog and off). I’ll either link to someone or I won’t and they’ll either link to me or they won’t. It seems like a waste of brain power to spend time pondering the best course of action.
Since I have the post open, I think I’ll go ahead and pull the nofollows. I wouldn’t want people to think I’m rude ;)
Thanks for bringing new life to an old post.
What do you think of nofollows in general? Do you use them on TheSocialMind?