Twitter for Dummies - Laura Fitton [34]
Whether you’re looking for business associates, news sources, friendly conversation, or anything else, Twitter can help you surround yourself with people and companies that can enrich your stream.
Look who’s talking
When you want to start looking for people to follow, see whether anyone’s already talked back to you. If you’ve already posted some tweets, people may have replied to you. (If you haven’t yet tweeted, what are you waiting for? Dive in and start tweeting!)
When someone wants to address you directly on Twitter, that user does so by replying to you. They simply put the @ symbol before your Twitter handle at the beginning of a tweet — that’s all it takes to reply. If you’re following that person, the tweet shows up in your Twitter stream. If you’re not following that person, you can still see any tweets that mention you on the Mentions tab in the sidebar (it’s the tab with @ followed by your username on it).
If you’re completely new to Twitter and you’ve only posted a handful of tweets, you probably won’t have any mentions yet. That’s okay! You have plenty of other options for finding people to follow (see the next sections).
Searching for people
You can best search for people on Twitter by using one of two methods: Twitter Search (http://search.twitter.com) or the People Search function (http://twitter.com/search/users). You can also reach Twitter’s People Search page (as shown in Figure 5-1) by clicking Find People in the upper-right corner of your Twitter screen’s toolbar.
Figure 5-1: Search for Twitter users on the People Search page.
Another, lesser-known way to find people on Twitter is by simply using the Google search engine at www.google.com. Because Google indexes every public tweet, you can use it to find twitterers by interest or by name. To use Google to find twitterers that you might want to follow, either search their firstname lastname and the word Twitter or do a slightly more specific search this way:
1. Type your keywords or the username you’re looking for in the text box.
2. Add site:Twitter.com at the end of your search query.
3. Click the Search button.
See what pops up! Figure 5-2 shows the results of a search for Lance Armstrong.
Figure 5-2: The Google results of a Twitter user search for Lance Armstrong.
You probably want to conduct people searches and keyword searches periodically to make sure that you continue to cultivate your Twitter experience’s richness and value with new voices. Although Twitter is great for reconnecting with old friends and keeping up a conversation with existing business associates, it’s also a fantastic way to reach out and find new people and companies to listen to.
A great way to get started following people on Twitter is to import your contacts from your Web-based e-mail account (like Yahoo! Mail or Gmail). We cover this in detail in Chapter 2.
Inviting people personally, through Twitter
Another option for inviting people to Twitter is to do it personally, directly to their individual e-mail addresses. You can find this tab (Invite By Email) on the Find People page (as shown in Figure 5-3), and it gives you a way to hand-pick people from your e-mail address book. You can also text Twitter at 40404 at anytime with the words invite yourfriend@yourfriend.com substituting in your friend’s e-mail address, of course.
Keep in mind that Twitter doesn’t offer you a chance to customize what the e-mail says. The person or company you invite gets a generic e-mail that mentions your Twitter handle and some basic information about how to sign up for an account. If you have people you want to invite to Twitter whom you think may not respond well to a generic e-mail, you can use the method described in the following section to invite them, instead.
Figure 5-3: The Twitter Invite By Email screen.
The main drawback to any of the invitation options in Twitter’s Web interface