Deciding who to follow on Twitter

ID chosen. Tick. Profile set up. Tick. Now what?  You have got this great Twitter profile, you might even have customised the page a little, chosen your own background, and added a photo (hopefully). Now what? 

You’ve got tonnes of stuff you want to say, but you are all alone with no followers.  We’ve all been there.  It can seem quite daunting deciding who to follow.... 

But should you tweet something first?  Yes, this is always a good idea.  When you follow someone, they might just want to check out who you are – if they have time and don’t have 2000 new followers every day.  So having an idea of who you are, what your interests are, will give them a good idea of whether to follow you back.  If you have had nothing to say, chances are they will take a view and pass, on a follow back!

So ID chosen. Tick.  Profile set up. Tick. Interesting first tweets. Tick.  Now you are ready to follow people.

Who you decide to follow will depend on the purpose of your account?  Is it for work or advancing your professional career?  Then stick to the type of people or company profiles which you think will provide the sort of information you are looking for. 

If you are using Twitter as a business development tool to target prospects then that is easy, look for the companies on your company in-house database (because you have got one, right?).  Look for similar companies who perhaps are not on your database (remember to add them to your database!). Look at their profiles.  Are they following anyone that you should also be following?  Yes, then you follow them too.  Who is following them?  Who are they following? It’s not stalking, it is intelligence gathering!

For each Social Media campaign, I always start with outlining my target audience.  This drives my work in this area.  I do this for two reasons, 1) if I can define who I am targeting I can look first at that social media platform and look to see if these sorts of audiences are represented there – if they are not, why bother? 2) If you start with a defined target audience you can tailor your tweets to areas that will be of interest to those people.  (The more of those types of people you follow, the more those types of people will follow you back generally works, but not always).

If you adopt a scatter gun approach, what will you get?  I doubt that approach has ever delivered anything remotely useful.   If your plan works you will find that the people that you are following and the people following you will be more closely aligned.  You will always have a few random followers, but they’ll soon get bored of your on topic tweets and retweets and will move on.  Whereas your follower list will start to resemble something useful, that you can build upon.  I try to keep a note of who is following me and what their interests are so that I can provide them with information that they will find useful.  If you are managing different twitter profiles with a slightly different message you might want to direct people to a twitter stream which would be more relevant to them.

Why not try this approach?  I would love to hear how it has worked (or not worked) for you.