Last week I attended a great meetup in Santa Cruz, at which Karen Kefauver, a local social media maven and journalist, presented a beginner’s overview of Twitter to about 25 eager local businesspeople. If you assume that everybody is already way ahead of you in this social media thing, fuggedaboutit. Like you, a lot of folks are so busy running their businesses, they haven’t had time to delve into the details of social media and Twitter.
No followers! Wah!
A question I heard asked more than once during Kefauver’s presentation was “How do I get people to follow me?”
Kefauver had one especially good tip: follow other people who are in your business or area of interest. The thing is, when you follow somebody, they may follow you back. Or not. But, their followers may notice you and follow you as a result. I’ve picked up some great followers who first noticed me after I followed a mutual Twitter friend.
Twitter Follower Discovery Tools
After the meeting, I spoke with Karen briefly and mentioned Mr. Tweet, a tool I’ve used for finding people with similar interests. Ben Parr, in his excellent post Use Social Media to Connect with Other Entrepreneurs, turned me on to another great tool called Listorious.
Listorious is another great way to filter Twitter users by type or tag. A tag, in case you don’t know, is a word or phrase that people use to identify a particular person or item on the Web. The more people tag your profile, say, as a dog lover, the more likely you’ll be identified on Listorious (and other services) as a dog lover.
But the cool thing about Listorious is that it picks up on the new Twitter lists feature. For example, in Ben’s post, he was talking about finding other entrepreneurs. When I went to Listorious following his link, I found the following page.
Listorious.com
Notice the lists on the left side of the page. Not only can you find entrepreneurs, but you can find social entrepreneurs, founders, and many other segments that may be more useful to you than the general set of entrepreneurs on Twitter. Of course, these are lists created by other Twitter users to help categorize their followers, so they may not be completely pure—meaning they may contain Twits who don’t belong in that category, if the person who made the list wasn’t as picky a list-maker as s/he could have been. But, for the most part, it works really well.
I found a list curated (created and maintained) by Vitor Lourenco, who is a product designer for Twitter. On his list, I scrolled down and found Dharmesh Shah, a co-founder of HubSpot, who I happen to admire.
Listorious.com
Turns out I wasn’t yet following Dharmesh Shah, so I clicked the FOLLOW link. Like many applications that can perform actions on your behalf inside of Twitter (saving you the trouble of constantly popping over to another tab or window to perform an action), Listorious will prompt you the first time for permission to update your follower list.
Listorious.com
I clicked the Allow button and Listorious added Mr. Shah to my following list. From now on, when I use Listorious to find other people to follow, I won’t be prompted for permission, because I’ve now allowed Listorious to update my list for me.
Listorious is a great tool for anybody to use to find like-minded people on Twitter. If you’re just getting started, it can be an invaluable tool.
