Nate Riggs: Social Business Strategies; communication, social web strategies, & passion in Columbus, Ohio.

We’re back to tools and presence again.  This post is actually a follow-up to last week’s post on how to benchmark your Twitter presence.  A lot of you said that was helpful.

Now that you’ve figured out where you stand, in terms of how you use Twitter and where your influence lies (in relation to everyone else), the next step is making adjustments.  If you plan to use Twitter in business communication, then you need to be savvy as to how to grow your following and mutual friend network with the right people.  The words “right people” can be defined as:

• The folks who share your professional passions and common interests
• The folks who want to pay you money for what you do
• The folks who know the folks who want to pay you money for what you do
• Generally good people you enjoy talking with

When I’m working on building out my own presence, there are five tools I use all the time.

Collecta

Lots of people talk about the power of using Twitter as a search engine so I won’t spend much time on this.  The beauty of searching Twitter is that everything happens in real time.  You can search for people, keywords, hashtags and even use advanced boolean techniques to filter down to the important stuff, which will save you tons of time.  Twitter Search (also known as search.twitter.com) is a good tool – and easy to use – but I prefer this little engine called Collecta.

Collecta takes real-time search a bit farther by not only delivering tweets based on your query, but also blogs posts, blog post comments and multimedia-like videos and images.  It’s comprehensive and free to use, and also has a manual refresh feature that keeps results scrolling down the page as they come in.  At times, the auto-refresh breaks down, but I usually just hit refresh and it starts up again.

I use this one a lot when I’m looking to track down and get to know people in new verticals and local markets that might fit with what we do at Social Business Strategies.  As a test, search for your the name of your city or industry and see what comes up.  You can filter the results with the checkbox on the right.

BlastFollow

BlastFollow wins my vote for the coolest third party Twitter app of 2010.

The idea is simple: automatically follow a list of anyone who might be tweeting to a specific hashtag on Twitter.  This works really well for any conferences or events that have named a specific tag.  I used it yesterday to follow a whole bunch of savvy folks who will be attending the EPIC Chevy Detroit Tweetup.  Thanks to BlastFollow, I followed 87 new people who I hope to meet IRL this weekend.

But hashtags are used for much more than events.  A hashtag is simply an easy way to curate a big conversation.  My friend, Mike Brown, regularly uses hashtags to like #marketing and #innovation to get his tweets in front of anyone who has a similar interest in those conversation topics.  Can you see how using BlastFollow might apply?

Let’s say you’re in business development and you want to grow your Twitter following with new folks who are thinking about B-to-B marketing.  First, search for #b2bmarketing or any other combination that would indicate that topic.  Always check first.  Some conversations are larger than others and you don’t want to overload BlastFollow.  Once you’ve found something manageable, plug in the hashtag and let BlastFollow do the work.

It will look something like this:

And when it’s done, BlastFollow gives you this report:

Twellow

The Twellow directory is an older Twitter mashup but still remains extremely relevant.  Essentially, Twellow is the Yellow Pages of Twitter, allowing users to upload and claim their profiles and then classify themselves based on interest.  While it can be a bit cumbersome to use at times, Twellow is helpful for targeting other users in niche-industry verticals.  Over time, the folks at Twellow have developed a variety of ways to slice up their data to make targeting easier.

What I like is that Twellow is very clean in its organization and has a great search feature.  You can also follow people directly from the search results page, which is a big win in terms of time savings.

SocialToo

SocialToo is a simple but dependable interface that allows you to automatically follow back all the people how follow you.  That’s helpful as it’s easy to miss people.  You probably know by now that Twitter – and the act of following – can be a bit emotionally tied.  I’ve had people get upset with me for not following them back, especially when they are folks I consider real-life friends.

SocialToo makes sure that you don’t have to worry about missing anyone.  It’s not free, but it is cheap.

ManageFlitter

One of the best strategies for growing your presence on Twitter is to breathe.  What I mean by “breathe” is that it’s typically more effective to follow lots of users at one time and then go back to scrub out the spam, bots and people who are really of no interest to you.  As your presence grows, though, following this process manually can become a serious time-suck.

ManageFlitter is a killer new application that makes the scrubbing process much easier and more efficient.  Due to Twitter’s API limits, ManageFlitter can only process the most recent 5,000 people in your Twitter profile so it’s important to use this tool often.  What I like best is having the complete control to sort followers by a variety of different criteria.  I often bring the people I follow that don’t follow me back to the top of the list and then begin to scrub them out, based on the user data that ManageFlitter delivers.  This is just a really well-designed presence management tool.

What did I miss?  What are you using to build your Twitter following with the right people?

nateriggs

I advise mid-sized & large organizations on how to adopt and use social media to market through organizational culture and better serve their clients. I'm also a blended family dad who enjoys music, photography and distance racing. When I'm not writing here, you can find me writing over at the Content Marketing Institute. Like what you've read so far? Then why not subscribe HERE?

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