How to Follow Someone on Twitter

For the past few weeks, I have been getting email alerts from Twitter informing me that various people have started to follow me. What these folks all have in common is that they are interested in the fashion industry. This is odd because I am NOT interested in the fashion industry: I don't tweet about fashion, style, or design. Occasionally, I'll tweet (more likely retweet) about website design, but that's a different subject. I am not on any lists related to fashion. Nearly all the lists I am on are related to voiceovers or libraries. And one social media list. And MarketHOLD/followfriday ("These people deserve to be mentioned EVERY week!")--gosh, thanks. I can only suppose that someone who is involved in fashion has either retweeted something I said or has included me in a followfriday tweet. Anyway, all you fashion folks, boy, by following me, you have come to the WRONG place.

So I thought I would provide some advice regarding how I find people I might want to follow, and then what criteria I use to make my decision to follow.

I do not rely on any lists to tell me who to follow. It's not that I don't think they're useful; I just got into the habit of doing my own searches and making my own decisions. I am therefore not in the habit of blindly following everyone on a list just because someone else thinks the posters are all great people. I do appreciate being on these lists, so thank you for your vote of confidence.

I note also that I am often included in those daily or weekly Twitter newsletters. I am aware that my copyright is being violated by these newsletters, but I let it go, since it is free publicity. Perhaps I will write about this in another post. Offhand, I can't remember whether those newsletters include advertising; if so, I'm not the one profiting from my work...but I'm off-topic.

The first thing I do is use Twitter's search box. There doesn't seem to be an advanced search box, but you can use Boolean operators (AND/OR/NOT) to combine search terms so that you don't have to do separate searches (#voiceover OR #voiceovers OR #vo). I am in the habit of putting the connectors in capital letters, a habit I got into from searching bibliographic databases.

Search for related concepts. For the purposes of this post, I am using voiceover as my favorite subject/concept, but you can insert your favorite (MontyPython, scarymovies, technology, etc.) So I'm searching for these concepts: voiceover #voiceover voiceovers #voiceovers VO #VO. Note that I search for both singular and plural forms of the word, because you don't know how people are going to use the term. Also, by searching for "voiceover" I am searching for a term that's merely used in a sentence, and other times, I'm searching for a term that the tweeter intends to use as the subject of the tweet (#voiceover). That's what the hashtag is for: subjects and keywords.

I would NOT split up the term (voice over, voice overs) because the risk is getting too many results where the words have been separated by other words, destroying the concept you're trying to find. (Ex.: Lost all my voice mails when I switched over to a different phone.) However, if you put the term
inside double quotation marks ("voice over") you will get relevant hits.

A note about shortening a concept to an abbreviation: sometimes abbreviations are actual words in another language, as vo is. If you get too much irrelevant information in your search result, do another search without the abbreviation.

Alright, so I have done a search on #voiceover, for example, and now I have a page full of tweets from people who have used that term with the hashtag because maybe they want to be found and followed for voiceover industry information. Do I just go down the page, following everyone? NO, NO, NO! One tweet does not an expert/helpful person/friend make. Take a look at that tweet. Is it interesting? Is there a link to something interesting? Or is it a personal message to someone the tweeter knows? If it's interesting, is THAT when you start following that person? NO! Click on the person's ID. Who are they? Where are they? What do they say they're interested in? If they say they're interested in voiceovers or are in the business, is THAT when you start following them? NO! Take a look at that whole page of their most recent tweets. What are they tweeting about? Are they tweeting more about voiceover, or are they usually tweeting about their dogs/children/significant others? Are they tweeting a lot of personal messages to other Twitter users? Are most of their tweets "Hire me! Please hire me. Need a good voice over? Then hire me!"? If there's a lot of noise and not enough signal for your taste, don't follow.

I don't mind retweets. Some people think that if all a person does is retweet the information provided by others, they're not worth following. I don't mind seeing a person's retweets, as long as what they're retweeting is relevant or useful. Often I have found other people to follow by clicking on the username of the person being retweeted and examining their Twitter feed.

Take a look at how often they tweet. Once a day? OK. Once a week? OK. Once an hour, maybe ok, as long as it's useful. Every 15 minutes? Too much. I want to be able to see what other people are saying.

I don't usually follow people mentioned in followfriday tweets. Because people have various interests, unless there's also a #vo hashtag on there with the usernames, I don't know why those folks have been recommended. Also, I usually check Twitter on my mobile phone, and don't want to waste the battery examining all those accounts at once. If someone is worth following, I'm sure you'll retweet something they have to say, and then I'll end up examining their Twitter feeds eventually anyway, and putting my criteria to use. But your workflow might be different, and you may very well prefer to have accounts recommended to you on followfridays; to each his own.

So that's how I discover and decide to follow people on Twitter. I am hopeful that some of those fashion folks will follow the tweet to this post, read it, and make more appropriate choices. Of course, they might find this useful and keep following me, and that's OK too.

I hope this was helpful. Oh, and by the way, on Twitter I'm @rachelsvoice.