Twitter: How to Find and Follow People on Twitter

Rich Brooks of flyte new media walks you through how to find friends and anyone else on the popular microblogging application Twitter. Follow him at http://twitter.com/therichbrooks

Video Transcription

Hey everybody, this is Rich Brooks from flyte new media, talking Twitter again. In our last video, what we did is we took a look at how you setup your Twitter account and how you kind of pimp out your page, and we are going to take it to the next step right now, and we are going to talk about how you find and follow people on Twitter. So as I talked about last time, one of the things you want to do before you start following people on Twitter is you really want to personalize your page by filling in your bio information, by uploading an image, and my other recommendation is probably you want to do five to ten twits before you start following anyone but your closest friends. That's just a good idea, because one of the things that happens when you follow somebody is they get an email saying, you are now following them. Their natural reaction is going to be to go check you out, and if you have a generic icon up there instead of your face, or you haven't filled out your bio, or you only have one or two post or twits, they are not going to be interested to follow you back. So really, get your page ready before you start following anybody. Alright. Well, when you are ready to follow somebody, you want to start with your friends. So you come up here to find people. In find people the first thing you want to do is you want to invite people from other networks if you have them. Now, if you happen to have an email account at Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL, MSN, or Gmail, this makes the whole job easy. You put in your Gmail address, your password, click on Continue, and Twitter will go out and find all the people from your account that are already on Twitter and then you can determine whether or not you want to follow them. Another thing you can do is if you don't have one of these services is click on Invite by email, and then you drop in your email addresses and you can invite them through Twitter by email. That's another good way, especially if you don't have one of those Gmail type accounts. The third way to find out if your friends are on Twitter is to use the Search box. So what you can do here is you can put in the location. I am always interested in following local people, so I might put in Portland, Maine or Maine, or I might do a search on somebody, say cybele brooks to find out if she is already on Twitter. So I click on Search, and sure enough, Cybele Brooks is on Twitter. If I know I want to follow her, I can just click right here to follow, or I can view her page, see if I like what she has to say, then go ahead and click Follow, and so now I am following Cybele Brooks. Another thing you may want to do to get outside of just your immediate group of friends is start following who they are following. So on the page I can see some of the people that's Cybele is following, so I might click on one of their little avatars. Now, it happened to be that I am already following my friend Des Walsh, but if I wasn't, I would be able to follow him right here. You can just go though and keep on going and finding other people that people are following and choose to follow them. Another tool that helps you find people that you might be interested in following is the search.twitter.com tool, which used to be called Summize, and a lot of Twitter people will still refer to it as Summize. From here, you can search on any twits, any post that people have put up. So whether you want to find people who love guitar hero or spiderman, or find one of these tracking Trending topics, these are all ways of finding people too. So you might do something like, oh, I really want to find out who is a guitar hero fan, and connect with these people. You can start to then, if you are interested, you could just click on their link and read more about these people, or you can come back here and do another Search. Maybe you are a company, corporation, and so you want to find out who is talking about your product and engage these people. So I can find all the people, okay, Dan De Rossett, Loves Red Bull Cola. So I can come in here, and maybe if I was Red Bull, I would start following him or engaging him. So that is how you find and follow people on Twitter. In our next episode we are going to talk about how to get people to follow you back, which is really great, because then you really starting to leverage the power of Twitter, engage people and start to build relationships, and it becomes a much more rewarding experience for you. Until next time, I am Rich Brooks and you can find me at Twitter at twitter.com/therichbrooks. So go ahead and follow this guy. Talk to you soon.