Twitter Find and Follow

[Jenifer Anseth]

Can someone please help me? How do I find people who already Twitter if I don't know their username? I don't have my contacts in hotmail, yahoo, gmail or etc. listed, and other than inviting them by email, I just don't know...
(Follow me on Twitter: azgiftbaskets)

[Matthew O'Brien]

Here are some options:
!. Upload your email list to find matches in Twitter. (This is in Twitter under Find & Follow)
2. Find people your know and look at the people they are following or are following them.
3. Use some other sites to search and find people you want to follow:
- http://search.twitter.com/
- http://tweetscan.com/

You may also want to set up an account on http://www.tweetlater.com/. This is a great way to create custom responses (thank yous) to people that follow you and to schedule tweets and syndicate your tweets.

Good luck!

Matt

[Jenifer Anseth]

Thank you so much Matt! I appreciate your help.

[Steven Groves]

Jenifer,I ran into the same question when I got started (BTW 'stevegroves' on Twitter).

What I did was I began using the 'Track' function to track specific phrases or words. Here is a link to the Twitter Support page on how to use it.

You may want to look at using the Hashtag capability too. Here is a great post on how to set it up and make it work for you. There is a #Phoenix group defined at Hashtag and a #Phx too...

...these are great ways to get in the global conversation that is Twitter.

[Jenifer Anseth]

Steven, Thank you so much! I really appreciate your response.

[Adam Nollmeyer]

Take the people you care about most, and send a PERSONAL email to them telling them about twitter, maybe link to "twitter in plain english" give them your username and ask if they are on twitter, or encourage them to join.

Just like facebook, once you find a few friends it's easy to "stalk" mutual friends by looking at their friend list.

~AcmePhoto
http://twitter.com/acmephoto

[Jenifer Anseth]

Thank you Adam! Yes, I've been having fun discovering what my friends find important to follow. I also discovered this week that a lot of my referral network has yet to become twitterized. I was giving a presentation to 60 people on Wednesday and asked how many of them were on twitter...1 person raised their hand. Looks like I'll be sending a lot of emails! :)