5 Sites To Help You Find People To Follow On Twitter

During the BrightTALK Microblogging Summit this week, one of the questions that was asked during the Make Good Media webinar, The Do’s & Don’ts of Building a B2B Community, was,  “What sites do you use and recommend for finding followers?” I thought if the attendees had the question, so might you.

Let’s just remember that during the #B2Bwebinar we defined community as:

A group of like minded people that share common interests, feelings, situations, and experiences.

So you want to use search terms and phrases, and pick categories of topics, that define your community.  Once you do that first step, the question is where to go?

Here’s my list and ratings. What’s yours?

1. Followerwonk.com

Twitter bio search. That is the easiest and best way to describe the Followerwonk. It offers very specific advanced search options to allow for very targeted searching of Twitter bios– including by location. The creators are located in Portland, OR. Rating: 4.5 out of 5

2. Twellow.com

Twellow is a directory of public Twitter accounts, and a service of WebProNews. With hundreds of categories and search features to goal is to help you find people who matter to you. Rating: Personally unrated as I have never used it, but colleagues have found it to be very useful.

3. wefollow

wefollow is a Twitter directory and search to help you find like minded people with common interests created by digg. Excellent UI on this site and you very easily can add your Twitter account to the categories most important to you. Rating: 4 out 5

4. Listorious

From the Listorious About page, “Listorious has the best Twitter people search on the web so you can find anyone by topic, region or profession — powered by data from the tens of thousands of list curators.” I REALLY enjoy using this site since it focuses on the “Lists” that have been created by Twitter uses. It was created by Sawhorse Media. Rating: 4.5 out of 5

5. Twitter ADVANCED Search

Of course, let’s not overlook the awesomeness of Twitter itself. The advanced search functionality offers loads of options – including attitudes, date range, places and more. Even better, for any search, you can then grab the RSS feed and add it to your favorite reader. I love it, I use it every day, and quite honestly, it’s led the way in real-time search and Facebook, Google, and Bing all changed as a result.  Rating: 5 out of 5 <- start here!

Some final advice on how to find your community of like minded people that share common interests, feelings, situations, and experiences –

• Mine the list of followers of your competitors
• Mine the list of followers of trade publications in your industry
• Mine the list of follower of industry associations and events
• Before, during and after an event that was your industry– find the Hashtag that was used – and search. If the tweet contains the hashtag, you know you at share that in common.

Have any other tips or advice to share with the community?

Author: Jeremy Victor | Website | Twitter

Jeremy's the founder of Make Good Media and Editor In Chief of B2Bbloggers.com. B2Bbloggers.com is a B2B Marketing online magazine discussing the evolution of B2B marketing. Topics include content marketing, B2B social media, demand generation, marketing automation, and more. Sign up. Get all the articles via email.