“How to Find People to Follow on Twitter” was co-authored by Stephanie Schwab and Christina Strickland

You know the influence of Twitter. It is, after all, a powerful and engaging social media platform. But, if you’re not following anyone and no one’s following you, it’s neither powerful nor engaging. You need followers (beyond your family and friends), and you need to be following other interesting Twitter users too. So, how do you do that? We have you covered. Here’s a quick guide to finding people to follow on Twitter.

How to Find People to Follow on Twitter: Make the First Move

When you’re just starting out on Twitter, you’ll want to find people to follow who will satisfy your objectives. You follow them, and a significant number will follow you right back! You may just want to lurk a bit and listen in on conversations at first. You may want to connect with influencers like journalists or bloggers, or you may want to find other people with similar interests. No matter what you’re trying to achieve, one of the most targeted ways to connect with like-minded people is to search Twitter bios.

How to Find People to Follow on Twitter: Try FollowerWonk

We think FollowerWonk is particularly useful for searching within the content of people’s bios, so you can get to the specifics people include there. It’s one of the best places to source Twitter users to follow.

Once you log in to FollowerWonk using your Twitter account, you’ll see a large search box. Let’s say you are a classical musician and you’d like to find people with the words ‘classical music’ in their bio who live in New York. You can add the phrase “classical music” in the search box and expand your search by choosing the small link below, entitled “more options.” Those other options include URL, number of followers, name, and location. Go ahead and choose your location since that’s what you are most interested in.

When you run the search, FollowerWonk not only delivers your results, but provides a list of people that tells you how long they’ve been on Twitter, what their influence is, how many followers they have, and how many times they’ve tweeted. The bio will tell you virtually everything else you need to know. So much information at your fingertips!

You’ll be able to decide if you want to follow a musician, a music blogger, a politician who loves classical music, or all three. You never know what kinds of conversations you’ll have or where it could lead until you start listening, sharing information, and meeting people with similar interests on Twitter.

When you’ve chosen from this richly annotated list of potential people to follow, you can look at the people they follow (since birds of a feather. . . ) and follow them. Before you know it, you’ll have collected yourself the most highly focused, fascinating community of people to talk to, listen to, and share information with, all with a few clicks.

Exciting isn’t it? But wait! There’s more.

How to Find People to Follow on Twitter: 4 More Tools

1. Crowdfire

Crowdfire is an app that lets you follow people by hashtag, location or even people following other Twitter users. It’s easy to use and also allows you to see a list of people who aren’t following you back.

2. Tweet Stork

Tweet Stork delivers recommendations to you based on tweets related to your own, users with lists similar to yours or users that retweet the same type of content you do. Just select your option and Tweet Stork will provide a list. You can even follow others without leaving the site.

3. SocialBro

SocialBro (now, Auisense) has a host of tools to help you grow your Twitter followers and find people to follow on Twitter.  Their targeted filtering capabilities help you find some of the most engaged people you can follow.

4. Twitter Advanced Search

This is Twitter’s own search tool. It’s become more robust over the past year or so and is definitely worth a look. It even allows you to include a search for sad or happy face characters or questions.

If you find a lot of interesting users, organize them into Twitter lists for easier conversation management. Of course, we’d never recommend following another user simply because they match a few bits of search criteria. Take a few moments to read through their Twitter bio and tweets to determine if the user is truly a good match for you. If he or she is, follow and be sure to engage!

To get what you want, you typically have to give a little something, and Twitter is no exception to this rule. Go ahead and find like-minded people to follow. Before you know it, you’ll have a long list of followers too.