In the previous post we talked about the importance of effective communication in building networks on Twitter. But the question remains: Whom must we follow and how can I gather followers?

The answer to this question lies in your Twitter goals. Suppose:

• You use Twitter for personal use: Then you’ll try to find your friends on twitter, celebrity accounts, popular blogs, news accounts and people with similar interests
• You use Twitter for business use: Then you’ll be looking for experts in your niche, people with common goals, interests, technologies, businesses, specializations etc.

To illustrate our point, we’ll try searching for people who play ‘golf’ and for professional search we’ll look for people associated with ‘CSS’.

Finding Friends using Search and Trends:

Use Twitter Search:

We can use Twitter’s real time search to find people playing golf. Firstly we look for the keyword ‘Golf’.

The results of the above search is:

But I’d like to follow people who play golf or are planning to do so. So I search for ‘I play golf’. The search result will be people who have said ‘I play golf’ in their tweets:

In this way you can use Twitter search for usernames or keywords in real-time tweets. You can then go ahead and add people who have similar interests like you.

This help in many ways:

• You get access to tweets that you can use
• You can provide assistance to the person because you have a common area of interest
• It is easier to strike a conversation

Apart from the generic twitter search, you can also search by user name and hashtags. There are several other services which lets you find people based on several keywords:

Twitseeker:

Twitseeker lets you search for terms in tweets as well as Twitter profiles and then sorts results by frequency of keyword occurrence. It will however require your Twitter ID.

Flaptor Search:

Flaptor Search is another Twitter search tool based on the Twitter API. Its got one of the most pleasing interfaces we’ve ever seen.

Twitterfall:

Twitterfall will give you a rush of Tweets in the form of a waterfall based on your search terms. Every search result is accompanied by a lot of options like retweet, follow, watch on Twitter etc. Extremely usable.

Twubble:

Twubble will take your Twitter username and find you people whom you can follow from the friends and followers list of your friends. It lets you expand your network from within your network, so that you have a common thread with your new friends.

Twitscoop:

Twitscoop shows you popular Twitter trends and lets you track conversations, conferences and updates based on your keywords.

Whostalkin:

Who’s Talkin searches for keywords not only across Twitter but across other social media platforms like blogs etc.

In our next post we’ll talk about finding followers from Twitter directories. Till then check the Twitter search options out and add some new friends.