Twitter is a powerful resource for networking. Businesses are using the medium to share their thoughts, exchange ideas, and even provide customer service. Your small business should be benefiting from Twitter's explosion and mass adoption by thought leaders in the business space.
Whatever your preferred reason, finding, following, connecting, and engaging with business-driven tweeters -- think executives, CEOs of companies in your space, and entrepreneurs -- is a great way to make social media work for your small business, grow your network, and learn from the best. Here are five ways that you can find the right people to connect with on Twitter:
1. ExecTweets - The latest resource for finding twittering executives, ExecTweets, is much more than directory. The site offers a stream of recent tweets from all listed executives, the option to browse people by industry, a list of the most popular executives, user voting/rating, a tag cloud with hot topics, and the ability to recommend an executive twitterer. The site is officially endorsed by Twitter and powered by Federated Media.
2. Twitter Directories - Third-party Twitter directories are a dime a dozen, but most of them are legitimate resources that offer convenient ways to find and follow interesting and knowledgeable twitterers from all professional backgrounds.??A few great ones to look into include Twellow, Just Tweet It , and WeFollow, the latter of the two are people-powered, which means twitterers have self-selected where their accounts should be listed. WeFollow is currently a very popular directory, because it owes it origins to Digg founder, Kevin Rose, whose web celebrity brings legitimacy and quantity to the site. Search tags or keywords related to your business and industry, and you'll get a list that is sorted by number of followers.
3. Twitter Packs - Twitter Packs is a wiki-style, community-driven site for finding people based on their self-selected packs, or groups, associated with their Twitter identity. Try browsing the packs by company to see twitterers listed out by their company affiliation, or the packs by topic to view advertisers, entrepreneurs, marketers, environmentalists, and members identifying themselves with a myriad of other topics.
4. Google Real Name + Twitter - One handy, yet underutilized trick, is to use Google to find business leaders that tweet. This trick works best if you're looking for a specific individual or business, and it's pretty straightforward. Simply type the full name or company name of the individual you're hoping to find, add "Twitter" to the end of the query, and submit your search. You should find exactly who you are looking for, should that person be tweeting, in the top 3 results.??The reason the trick works so well is that business types typically use their full name as their Twitter name or in their Twitter bio, all of which is indexed by Google. Plus, even if they don't use their full name, chances are that someone in the Twittersphere has discovered their real identity and tweeted or blogged about it. To see what I'm talking about, just Google "Mark Zuckerberg Twitter."
5. Find the Enterprise Community Managers and Social Media Professionals - Jeremiah Owyang, a Forrester Research analyst, uses his blog, Web Strategy, to catalogue, research, and share his findings on the social media space. He's been actively collecting and publishing a list of vetted names of social media and community professionals in the enterprise.
This list is a gold mine of data on some of the most important people at the biggest companies who are using social media to connect with customers and clients. You can use his list to find names, and tip #4 on this list to find to their Twitter accounts. Chances are you'll find a mix of thought leaders and business professionals that you should be connecting with to grow your own business.
