Connecting with users on Twitter
Sorry for the lack of posts. The wife and I took a two week road trip and I failed (again) to pre-author posts for release during my absence.
While catching up on the 1000+ posts in my reader, I came across an interesting post by Scott Hepburn that touched on Twitter’s problem retaining new users. In my opinion, the problem with new user retention is a lack of imagination on their part. I’ve said it before, and I’ll keep on saying it, the power of Twitter is in your imagination! You must learn to leverage it for your needs.
Twitter is merely a tool. If you take the time to understand it and use your imagination when leveraging it, it can be an extremely powerful tool.
A good start for leveraging Twitter, is to connect with other Twitter users with similar interests. So how do you do that? Twitter search.
Twitter search is the perfect tool as it allows you to search peoples tweets for keywords. First thing you’ll want to do is identify what keywords you want to search for. These keywords should be relevant to subjects that you Twitter about. Why? You’re trying to plant the seeds for community here. You want to approach people who will have a high probability of finding your tweets interesting and will be likely to retweet your updates and engage you in online conversation.
For example: I love food and all things culinary. A recent experience at Lola in Cleveland has me obsessed with pork belly. So I decided to do a search for people Twittering about “Pork Belly“.
Next step is to read through these tweets and based on their content, identify users who might be interested in what you have to say.
Here are my search results with the target users highlighted.
Follow these people, hopefully they’ll follow you back. Do this exercise on a regular basis and you’ll soon find yourself with thousands of targeted and valuable followers.
Posted by Jeremy Hilton on May. 22, 2009
Comments
Interesting take on figuring out who to follow (makes me wonder how you found me). I’ve taken slower, more organic approach by mainly following folks from three sources:
- those who follow, or are followed by, Tweeple I’m already following (I enjoy taking a few minutes now and then to click on the tiny photos and icons and see who they are)
- people mentioned and linked in the Tweets in my stream that seem interesting (including #followfriday recommendations)
- people who follow me first (I always looked at their bios and usually click through their web URL - which is how I got here!)
Of course, I had the huge advantage of coming to Twitter after my tweetee @y2vonne already had a couple thousand followers for me to choose from! But I bet just about everyone who might be inclined to try Twitter knows at least one other person with a following to browse, no?
Posted by Tom Collins on 06/01/2009 09:14 AM
Twitter is fast obtaining ubiquity with US internet users, so I agree, most everyone knows at least one person with a following to browse.
BTW, I found you through a search related to social media.
Posted by Jeremy Hilton on 06/03/2009 06:26 PM
Good little how-to, but you missed one crucial step. After searching, finding, and following these users, make sure you tweet at them! It’s especially use with the twitter search since many of the results you’ll find will be from users who sent out messages recently and are looking for interaction around those keywords. Just blindly following them might make them not even notice you, but if you tweet at them about pork belly you’ll likely get a response and a follow back.
Posted by Adam Pieniazek on 05/22/2009 11:20 PM