After you join Twitter, who do you follow? Deciding this can be an overwhelming task, especially if your goal is to avoid the noise on Twitter and trade messages with trusted colleagues and thought leaders in your industry.
Millions of people tweet everyday. Consequently, it's hard to find the best experts or luminaries. What are their Twitter handles? Are they even on Twitter?
Like many challenges facing users who meander through the burgeoning social network each day, there isn't a perfect solution. But we caught up with some social media experts who offered useful tips on how best to find the right people on Twitter, based on your interests.
Simply Search
For starters, Twitter offers some basic search tools that help, such as the "Find People" tool, which you access next to the "profile" link in the upper right corner of your home page. After you click on it, you will be brought to a page with four tabs.
Under the first tab, labeled "find on Twitter," you can search for someone's Twitter profile and handle by entering his or her name. It's not always intuitive, though. You must key in users' names precisely as they have them in their Twitter profiles. For example, I queried the tool for the name "Tom Wailgum," a colleague of mine at CIO.com. He didn't turn up in the results. Why? He used the more formal "Thomas Wailgum" in his Twitter profile.
With generic names, like a "John Smith," you might have the opposite problem: You'll get too many results (middle initials might help). Celebrities and luminaries in the business world - like a Jack Welch - usually come up pretty easily, however.
Under the "find on other networks" tab, Twitter will search your e-mail accounts to see which of your colleagues or business contacts might already be using Twitter. Unfortunately for businesspeople, this tool searches consumer messaging services (Gmail, Yahoo, and AOL), rather than Microsoft Outlook or Lotus Notes.
Twitter also includes a "suggested users" tab, which the service automatically generates. It's worth a look.
You can then use Twitter's main search tool to search for keywords related to your industry (and you can see who is tweeting them), says Caroline Dangson ( @carolinedangson), an IDC research analyst.
"It's a bit more manual, but search can be effective because Twitter isn't a closed network like Facebook," Dangson says.
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