Have you just started using Twitter and found this article on Google when trying to find help on who you should follow? Well, you came to the right place. Check out the pointers below and enjoy a great entertaining, informative and people-connecting Twitter experience.
Many Twitter power-users might not recall it, but starting out on Twitter is really difficult. How interesting or value adding Twitter is for the Twitter users is entirely up to them and nobody will help them to adjust and configure their Twitter timeline.
Twitter is not a social network that requires a reciprocal (two-way) connection between the users. On Facebook or LinkedIn it will require both users to agree to being connected to each other and this is not the case for Twitter. You can follow anyone you like on Twitter and they don’t necessarily need to follow you back.
How to make your Twitter timeline interesting?
You need to start following users, who primarily tweet content, that you find interesting. There might be an off-topic here and there, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be of interest to you. If something leaves your focus area, maybe you’ll even learn something completely new. Maybe you develop a new interest based on that. After all, news are always relevant and opinions are flexible.
So first thing you are most likely going to do is start following people on Twitter, who you already know, regardless of what they tweet, but because they are your colleagues, friends, or maybe family. Based on my experiences I can already tell you that it’s very likely that most, if not all, of those are not even using Twitter actively anymore. And what does that do to your timeline? Nothing – It will stay empty and not get updates.
How to find people to follow on Twitter?
Twitter probably suggested you to follow some celebrities and general accounts with millions of followers, regardless of what you are interested in. If you like, you can follow those for an initial timeline setup, and you can unfollow those later if you don’t like their updates.
If you are looking for people who tweet about things you care about you should try the Twitter search. There is an object on the horizontal top navigation bar, where you can enter text and then either search for users or tweets containing the word you entered. It is not mandatory nowadays but you might get better results if you use #hashtags in the Twitter search.
Hashtags on Twitter are a “Folksonomy” and they are not centrally managed. If you don’t know the “right” hashtag for your field of interest, you may try out a hashtag search engine, like Hashtagify.me, which also provides you with hashtag alternatives and analytics, so you can easily tell which is the hashtag, which most people use in their tweets.
If your Twitter search then returns a list of users who are associated with the searched term, you may check them out or directly follow a few of those. Remember, you can always unfollow them later, if you picked a user, who doesn’t share content you are interested in.
The ultimate recommendation who to follow on Twitter
Towards the end of 2015 Silvia Spiva, who also frequently posts articles here on TechAcute, made the effort to select 50 special people on Twitter and recognized them with a Twitter-Award. From my perspective those individuals post excellent tweets. You can subscribe to the list or check out, who it consists of and then cherry-pick the ones you find interesting or simply follow them all. If you follow only 50 people on Twitter, those are the 50 you need in your timeline. That’s a no-brainer!
Photo credit: Electronic Frontier Foundation
