As a follow-up to my last post (about getting more followers on Twitter through auto-follows), I wanted to post quickly about how I’m finding the right people to follow (and hoping they auto-follow me).

At first I was searching Twitter for keywords, manually (at search.twitter.com), reading conversations and cherry-picking the best. Then I was joining conversations and trying to be friendly and funny and charming, just as I would at a real life party.

Now, I’m letting TweetLater do the searching for me ¹.

I used their free service to set up a search for tweets that contained certain keywords and told it to email me once a day with the results. (You can customize it to send them more or less frequently). I checked the tweets and, if I liked what I saw, I followed.

In my case, I wanted to build relationships with other parents of kindergartners. Since it was June, and everyone was finishing school, it was easy to choose my keywords: “kindergarten graduation”.

I’d suggest starting with one or two keywords at first, to avoid being overwhelmed.  Check what’s working, change what’s not.

You can auto-follow everyone, but at some point it becomes too much. If you’re not chatting back and forth with at least some of your “Tweeps”, no-one will listen when you do talk.

After all, it’s the same thing online or off: you’re more likely to listen to your friends than a stranger. Smart following on Twitter  helps you make more ‘friends’.