Twitter Primer Redux - 9 ways to find people to follow on Twitter.

I was asked last night about how I find people to follow on Twitter, so I thought I'd turn that into a quick post. Twitter is an incredibly useful tool but it's easy to miss out, if you don't follow people who can give you whatever insight you are looking for.

I am currently following 332 people, and have 273 followers. Here's a few resources I have used:

1. Twitter Pack Project - check out the Nonprofit Pack in particular. When I posted about this recently, I followed everyone on this list. Most of them followed me back! I also followed a lot of the Social Media people on the list when I cam across it originally.

2. Twitterlocal - click on your location, if it's in the list, or download and do a search, if it's not, and this site will give you a list of Twitterers local to you. Since I am particularly interested in social media, and social media junkies are all on Twitter, I was lucky and found a whole crowd of cool local DC people this way.

3. Search Twitter for something specific and see who's talking about that subject. Use Summize, (check out the search results for "non-profits" I just put in) or Tweetscan.

4. Bookmark the nonprofit pulse and click on the people who have interesting things to say.

5. Check out what's being discussed on Twitbuzz, which lists the top links being tweeted, most "social" people, and top conversations. Obviously this is mostly tech topics or some hot news topic.

6. Who Should I Follow. com - this gives you a list of people you might be interested in based on who your twitter friends follow. Twubble does the same thing but comes up with different results. Wait to do these until you have a few people in your follow list!

7. Every once in a while, do this last yourself - click on some of your friends' follow/friend lists and see who they follow. I have found a ton of interesting people to follow that way.

8. Listen to recommendations! If you see someone tweet, "follow @johndoe, he has a good post on xxx", then check him out! Or "Follow @janedoe, she's new on Twitter" - do that too, if you're inclined to be friendly. @janedoe could prove to be well connected and a source of good tweets and good future follows.

9. Every time you come across a new blog you like via your RSS feed, go to the site to see if the blogger is on Twitter and follow him or her.

As you can imagine, this is all fairly self-propagating and the more people you find of interest to follow, the more people you will find of interest to follow. If you get what I'm saying.

Two final thoughts:

Don't be shy about "unfollowing" people who no longer interest you. Twitter won't let them know you are unfollowing them, they won't get offended. In fact, I think you should follow as many as you can at first, then every once in a while... streamline.

And lastly, remember to acknowledge when people follow you back! A nice online handshake and "thanks for the follow!" never goes amiss, and makes you stand out from the crowd.

Any more? Let me know if you know of other good Twitter tips.