While Twitter is a pretty useful networking tool, it works best when you have access to the information you need. It would be very tedious to go through hundreds of profiles, looking for people who are interested in the same things as you. Twitter does have a search, but there are now many other options that will let you find the people or tweets you are looking for quickly and easily.
Finding People
Until recently, it was pretty time consuming to find people that you wanted to network with. You could search for relevant blogs and sites on Google, then follow anyone from those that was on Twitter. These days, though, there is a much easier way . . . several, in fact.
Twellow: The Yellow Pages of Twitter, this site lets you quickly and easily find people related to your field. You can search by profession or subject and Twellow will pull up profiles that match the search.
Tweetscan: This very simple site allows you to search by topic. If you’re looking for people in social media, for example, you would simply type in “social media” and you’d get back the results of everyone who uses those keywords in their profile.
TwitterPacks: If you are in a hurry, this could be the way to go. Pick a “pack” which is based on a specific niche or location and follow everyone on it. This gives you hundreds of new contacts in a very short period of time, but you might want to be careful, since there are bound to be a few bad apples. These are all user recommended though.
Who Should I Follow?: Like the name suggests, this is a site that recommends people for you to follow, based on your existing friends. It then tells you which of your friends each recommendation is similar to.
Twubble: This is an interesting Twitter search. It goes through your friends friends and recommends the best ones for you to follow. This saves you time searching through everyone’s contact lists, which can be quite daunting.
Just Tweet It: Search for Twitter users by career choice on this handy search engine. There don’t seem to be huge numbers of people using this site yet, but it could still be very useful.
Mr. Tweet: Billed as “your personal networking assistant”, this site allows you to follow influencial people on the popular social networking site.
Just these sites should keep you pretty busy adding people to your contact list, but you can also still do things the old-fashioned way, through Twitter search or by befriending people who publish their Twitter ID on their blogs or forums.
