Twitter: Just Another Way To Follow Nice People

Yeah I know there are loads of articles on following nice people on Twitter and getting followed back, but I found this method using WeFollow and TweetDeck very effective. And remember, in social media it’s not only about the quantity!

Most of you heard about a Twitter directory called Twellow. Well, to me it’s kinda old and also annoying when you have to register and fill out your profile, then browse through people by interest and start following some (ordered by popularity of course). I don’t like this method because:

1. You’re less likely to get a followback, ’cause the tweeps on the first few pages are like the celebrities of whatever category you’re browsing
2. You have to look through their latest activities, to make sure they still tweet about categories they’ve gone for
3. There are loads of people that submit themselves into more than 5 categories – I doubt that they’re gonna read your tweets, cause they’re focused on promoting theirs
4. Twellow is ugly

Take a look at WeFollow. The title says it all – User Powered Twitter Directory. The best thing about WeFollow is that you don’t even have to register. You don’t even have to follow @wefollow (although I encourage you to, just to keep up with what’s going on there). The steps are pretty easy: browse to add to directory page, authorize WeFollow on Twitter and voila. Pick up to three hash tags to follow and you’ll see yourself tweet a “wefollow #tag1 #tag2 #tag3” public. Okay, that’s only the beginning.

Now the real fun comes when you start to look for people to follow. The traditional method is opening up a search screen in TweetDeck with a ‘#tag1’ query to find people buzzing about tag1. Yeah, you’ll find loads of people using #tag1 in their tweets, but that doesn’t mean that they’re very interested in #tag1 and they might have just used it once in a month, and there you go running after them… Nah! Remember @wefollow. Tweeting out wefollow … expects you to actually follow (!!) your chosen tags, rather then just to get listed in the directory (some still don’t get the point though). I follow five tags, three of which are on my wefollow list (you can’t get more). Oh when I say ‘follow a tag’ I mean have it open as a Search ‘#tag’ column in TweetDeck (hope you get what I mean).

Anyways, back to following. Once you have a Search ‘#tag’ open, use a Filter and add ‘wefollow’. All the tweets in the column will look similar to ‘wefollow #yourtag and two more’. Now, these are the people, who joined the directory several minutes ago (or hours.. or days.. depending on the tag you’ve chosen). Go ahead and follow some (just make sure the other two tags are not completely irrelevant to the first – generally a bad idea). There’s a big chance you’ll get a follow back, especially if they’re at around 100-500 followers. And those are the people that interest you the most, not rockstars and celebrities.

Oh, and please turn off those auto-reply on follow – they’re way too annoying! Thanks.