Teach me your TwitterFu

June 28, 2009 9:10 PM

Help me become a Twittermeister. How do people find you and what apps do you run?

I was tweeting lots of ideas from a conference in the last couple of days. In the process, I gathered 27 new followers. So my question is, how did these people find my tweets? What apps do people run (pref. for Windows) to see the twitter "stream" as it goes past? How can I, in turn, find the fascinating stuff that is going on?
I found this previous question, but the links are either dead or don't apply. I'm a techie, but a relative newbie to twitter, so I'd appreciate some TwitterFu ...

posted by Susurration to computers & internet (5 comments total)

They probably use something like TweetDeck and have searches on particular keywords that you used during your conference tweeting. Whenever I have been twittering particularly heavily I get new followers.

TweetDeck is what I use for monitoring things for work. I have searches set up for our brand (name.com), domains, domain names and once in a while I set up the competition as a search so I can see what is being said about them.
posted by FlamingBore at 9:35 PM on June 28

I'm fairly new to Twitter myself, but I use it primarily on my iPhone through the Twitterrific App.

There's an option in the Twitterrific App that allows you to set up and save Custom Searches, so you can easily click on them later and see who's recently been tweeting about your saved set of keywords. I'm working on a project that's slowly being released to the public, so I've set up a bunch of custom searches pertaining to that, and basically get anonymous feedback about the project whenever I check it.
posted by Squee at 9:36 PM on June 28

I have found some interesting Twitterers to follow by first following some celebrities and then looking to see who else is following them and who they follow. There are also a growing number of schools, state agencies, and organizations that I follow and I've done the same thing with those. Watch out though as I've had a few unwanted followers that I had to block. I now have my settings so that I have to approve new followers first.
posted by tamitang at 10:25 PM on June 28

I use the Tweetie app for my iPhone, and Twitterfox on my laptop.

Seconding FlamingBore for the rest.

I've also observed that simply following certain people (i.e.: problogger) will get you hundreds of followers, but most of them are spammy marketing and "look how many followers I have" types. I had to remove certain people after about a week because of that (in my opinion, that is not what Twitter is for). Also, avoid the "get 10,000 followers a day" scams - also spammy.
posted by mewithoutyou at 11:14 PM on June 28

I seem to get the most new followers after a skillful use of hashtags. (course, I only have 48 followers, so maybe not that "skillful")

And really, the only hashtag I've used fairly often is for my local city ( #fortcollins ) and usually I'm reminding about a near-future event, or giving a review of someplace new I went for lunch,etc. I dont think my tweets are especially hip or "leet"... I just try to keep them simple, practical and insightful/fun to read.
posted by jmnugent at 8:49 AM on June 29