How To Identify Quality and Relevant Twitter Users to Follow

New to Twitter? Are you overwhelmed, confused, or unsure how to identify quality Twitter Users? According to Mashable’s Adam Ostrow, as of April 28, 2009, Twitter had roughly 6 million registered users and that number will likely double by the end of 2009. How do I wade through the 6 million + Twitter users and connect with Quality Twitter Followers? The goal of this post is to help Twitter users identify quality and relevant tweeps!

Leverage Twitter People Search to Identify Quality Tweeps

Twitter People Search

Start following people that you know. Search for your family, friends, and colleagues. Twitter People Search is a great starting point to find people that you know on Twitter. Twitter people search offers “twitter suggested users,” but most of them are large businesses or famous people and likely not 100% relevant to you, or your business. I’m sure this feature will get much better over time with respect to identifying quality and more relevant users. For now, there are a few 3rd party applications that help to identify quality and relevant users.

Identify Quality Tweeps with WeFollow

WeFollow

WeFollow is a Twitter Directory. The wefollow twitter directory is a user generated directory, where Twitter users sign up and associate themselves with particular keywords and hashtags (#). In my opinion, wefollow is the best tool for Identifying Quality and Relevant Twitter Users becuase you can sort by “Influence” and “Followers.” Are you a PPC Marketer? Want to connect with other PPC Marketers on Twitter? No Problem. Go to wefollow and search by keyword “PPC.” You will find a list of 390 (today) twitter users that identified themselves as PPC Marketers and you can sort those 390 twitter users by “Influence” or by “Followers.”

Identify Quality Twitter Users with Mr Tweet

Mr Tweet

Mr Tweet is a twitter recommendation engine that is updated daily (almost real time). Mr Tweet’s slogan is: “Filtering through the twitterverse to find people your network trusts (including followers you are not following yet).” Mr Tweet is is helpful over time as you build up followers and friends on twitter to identify other like-minded, quality and relevant tweeps.

Using Twitter Search to find Quality and Relevant Twitter Users

Twitter search is my favorite way to search for like-minded tweeps. Simply, type a keyword phrase (with or without a hashtag in front of the keyword phrase) that is relevant to you/your business into the twitter search function and you will see the most recent Tweets for that particular keyword phrase. For Example, if I want to find experts in creating a B2B Social Media Marketing Strategy, I may search twitter using the following keyword(s) and hastags:

B2B
B2B Marketing
B2B Social Media
B2B Social Media Marketing
B2B SMM
SMM
#SMM
#B2B
#B2Bmarketing
(you get the idea)

How To: decide if the Twitter user is Quality and Relevant

Here is a twitter checklist for determining Quality and Relevance of a Twitter User.

What do I look for in the Twitter User Profile and TwitterStream?

Do they have a picture/avatar?
What is the picture/avatar?
What is the name of the twitter user?
Is the twitter name real? (Don’t be that sketchy twitter user)
Is the twitter name a business?
Is the twitter name a keyword phrase?
Is there a link in the twitter profile?
Is there a link to a personal blog or linkedin page?
Is the link in the twitter profile a shortened link? For Example, a bit.ly link in the twitter profile?
Does the description describe a person or business or something else?
What keywords are in the description?
How many followers do they have?
How many people do they follow?
How many times are they listed?
How many tweets do they have?

Red Flags in the Twitter User Profile and Twitter Stream

Any Porn relate photo/avatar
No photo/avatar
Following thousands of people with not many people following back
Following thousands of people with not many tweets or no tweets
Following tens of thousands of people and having tens of thousands of followers, but not many tweets
Following tens of thousands of people and having tens of thousands of followers, but not listed or listed very few times
Anything MLM related in the description or Twitter Stream?
What links are recently posted in the Twitter Stream?
Is the same link posted more than 1 time in back-to-back tweets in the Twitter Stream? More than 3 times in back-to-back-t0-back tweets in the Twitter Stream? (Dear, Lord)
Does each Tweet start with “RT” in the Twitter Stream?
Are comments added to RTs in the Twitter Stream?
Any other language besides English in the twitter stream? (This is an interesting one. I do follow some people that Tweet in English and a few other languages, but the primary language used on Twitter is English)

What questions do you ask yourself and/or what do you look for in identifying quality/relevant Twitter Users? Please add to the list in the comments section!