Friends Don't Let Friends Tweet Alone

So, you have a Twitter account and you have found one of your friends to follow. As you tweet together you start to see the benefit of the 140 character conversation, yet there seems to be lack of variety in your conversation.

You have reached the Twitter crossroads! Do you actively seek others to follow in order to enrich your Twitter experience? Do you start asking everyone you know, and just meet, what their Twitter id is? Do you start following all the strange accounts that have begun to find you, just to feel like you are tweeting with someone?

Maybe you do all of the above. Or maybe, you lose interest.

In most cases people sign up to Twitter, tweet for a bit, maybe every month or so, and then eventually they just stop tweeting all together.

Finding relevancy in your Twitter experience is what will keep you tweeting.

First, it is all about finding the right people to tweet with. You can start by using the search function in Twitter and looking for those tweeting about your local city or town.

For most towns you will find a lot of people tweeting as they pass through, however you will more than likely find several that are talking about a local event they are attending, a restaurant they are eating at, or better yet letting everyone know they just moved to the area.

When you find truly local people, you will likely find hashtags they are using that you can then search on to find more local people. In the case of Grand Junction, if you find someone local tweeting, you will likely find someone using the #gjco in their tweets.

The next search you would do would be #gjco.

As you can see it is a little bit of an investigative journey, think James Bond.

To follow someone simply click on the picture next to the tweet that interests you, it will take you to that persons Twitter profile. Then it is simply a matter of clicking on the follow button.

Not everyone will follow you back. There are so many philosophies on following. Some believe that you follow everyone that follows you. Others believe you only follow those of quality that will enhance your Twitter stream. Find your comfort zone and go with it, and realize that others out there will have a different approach.

When someone does follow you back you will then have the ability to send them a direct message (DM), or private tweet.

To continue on this journey it is all about looking at business cards and websites of those that you meet. Many business professionals are adding this contact information right along side their phone numbers. For example if you look at the header of this page there is a row of buttons one of them is a lower case t – that is the button that will take you to my Twitter profile.

If you meet someone and it isn’t on their business card, consider asking them if they are on Twitter. If they give you a user name like “TheGame.” You then have enough information to find them and follow them.

Simply add the user name to the end of the Twitter URL: www.Twitter.com/TheGame.

This will again take you to the person’s profile page and you can click on the follow button.

Finally, if you are just looking for someone with similar interests as you, try using the website WeFollow. It will search through the users that are registered for the hashtags they use. There is also a list down the right that will break some of the tweeters out into popular categories.

Before you jump out into the Twitter stream, a word of caution, you will probably begin to get DM’s and tweets trying to entice you into services that will get you 10,000+ followers a day. I encourage you to ignore those messages, as the use of those services can jeopardize your account.

For now, those simple methods should give you a good start to finding local people and those with similar interests to tweet with.