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’.

Recently, I was building a new Twitter persona for a business and trying to figure out how to gain exposure.

I started by using Twitter’s search function to find people who were tweeting about the same topic. Then I followed as many as I could find. (I’m continuing to add to the list each day.)

Why?

Well, a lot of Tweeple (that’s Twitter People, in case you haven’t heard) like to follow anyone who follows them. Sure, it makes keeping up with tweets hard, but from a business point of view it makes sense: the more people you follow and are followed by, the more chance there is of someone reading your tweets. If you are targeting your followers through keyword searches, then you have found your audience. And — because of the auto-follow etiquette — they have found you.

After monitoring the profile for a while and manually following people who followed me I quickly realized I needed to automate the process and focus my energies on creating great content.

Dave Taylor has posted an excellent tutorial (with screenshots, hoorah!) taught me how to use TweetLater to handle the automation. TweetLater has other useful tools too, but for now I’m using it to

• auto-follow,  and
• send a ‘welcome’ message when people follow the profile, linking back to the business’s website.

I’m scanning tweets and jumping in to conversations, and tweeting whenever the business has some news or a new blog post. I”m also engaging with people who write back to thank me for the welcome message, and many have.

I have started to see increased traffic on the business website with this unobtrusive and, frankly fun form of marketing. It feels collaborative and light-hearted and nothing like “sales”!