Five Twitter Tools to Expand your Circle of Friends

Posted by Martin Jamieson | April 20, 2008 .

If you’ve read a few posts on this blog, you’ll know that I’m a fan of Twitter (you can access my profile here), I’ve already written a few thoughts about Twitter and a discussion on why social networking websites are important to bloggers, but today I want to share some links with you on tools that will help you grow your circle of friends on Twitter.

Before we get started though, If you’re new to the Twitter network, there are a couple of things I need to mention first so that you can maximise the chance of people following you:

  • Customise your profile: Add an avatar and a background image to your twitter home page. It doesn’t need to be anything elaborate (in fact simple is good), but having something other than the default will make your Twitter profile look active and thereby more attractive to potential followers.
  • Grow your network of friends organically: You may be tempted to start following everyone and anyone you come across in the hope that many will follow you back. While that may work to some degree, it is generally a big mistake as experienced Twitter users will usually look at your ratio of ‘following to followers’ as a quick way to judge if they should follow you or not. The reasoning is that if you’re following a couple of thousand people, but only have a couple of hundred following you back, then chances are either a) your tweets are uninteresting, b) you’re a spammer, or c) you have no interest in interacting with those you follow, only in growing your own followers. It is important that you don’t get this ration too far out of balance.
  • Be an active user: People are less likely to follow you if you don’t post much.

Ok, so how do you find new people to follow that have similar interests to you and will probably follow you back? You’ve got plenty of choices, all of them easy.

Twubble

Twubble works by searching the people you’re currently following for common people that they are following… so essentially it’s polling your friends, getting their recommendations and tallying up the votes. An excellent way to quickly find heaps of people with similar interests.

Twits Like Me

Twits Like Me does some similar calcuations and comes up with a list of users it thinks might be of interest to you. Clcik on their profiles, check their current twitter stream and decide whether you’d like to follow them. Easy and effortless way to find good friend recommendations.

Twitterholic

Do you want to know who the top 100 Twitterers are (listed by number of followers)? Twitterholic shows you who they are. Find one with similar interests to you, and start searching through the profiles of their followers - you’re sure to find plenty of interesting people there.

Twitter Local

Want to find other people tweeting near you? Twitter Local lets you enter your city, state, postal code etc. and it will tell you who else is using Twitter near your location. Surprisingly good way to find people close to you with similar interests.

Twitter Blocks

Twitter Blocks gives a visual representation of currently active people you’re following, and active people that they are following etc. Work your way through the graph and see who you find.

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2 Comments so far
  1. Quiet Rebel Writer » Blog Archive » Lassoed Links - Sunday, 4/20 April 21, 2008 2:45 am

    [...] Five Twitter Tools to Expand your Circle of Friends [...]

  2. Clayton Bell | Online » Blog Archive » The Hot Links 4.26.08 April 27, 2008 1:21 am

    [...] More great Twitter tools. Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated. [...]