Blogging Tips

When it comes to networking on Twitter, you need a place to start. Find people that will benefit you when connecting with others, and you’ll be set on the right track for creating pockets of useful communities within the Twitterverse. There are a few ways to get started on this. One way is to perform a regular Twitter search on topics that are of interest to you. See who’s tweeting about these topics, and follow them. From there, you can interact with them by mentioning their username in your own tweets, especially in reply to a tweet update that they’ve posted.

But if you’d like a more automated way in which to get started along a similar path, with more longevity than a manual Twitter search, check out Followformation. This Twitter application lets you pick several categories that may be of interest to you. Choose as many of these categories as you’d like, or create your own category.

Next you select how many top Twitter users you’d like to follow. The minimum is ten. Per Followformation’s standards, a top Twitter user is the one with the most users per given category.
This could ultimately be problomatic, as a user with a high number of followers may not be an expert on your particular topic of interest, or that topic may not be central to their regular Twitter conversation. To this end, it’s best to merely experiment with Followformation and its recommendations for the time being, and keep an eye on the content coming fromthe Twitter users you actually choose to follow (as opposed to merely receiving keyword updates from a wide range of users).

While there are a number of different tools out there that provide recommendations for topics and individual users that you can follow, some of which are included in things like Twitter desktop clients, Followformation has a nice user interface and a simplistic format that’s very easy to use. There are helpful features such as a preview window that displays the users tweeting about a given category when you scroll over it.

What would make Followformation additionally useful would be filtered views, additional subscription options for collective tweets coming from recommended users, and perhaps an easier way in which to update and manage the categories you’re following once you’ve registered with Followformation.