The 5 best ways to find people to follow on Twitter

You’ve followed your friends and co-workers, but who do you follow next?

I’ve been using Twitter for almost 3 years and I’m always looking for new people to follow and converse with. Even after all this time, it can still be hard to separate the spammers from the worthwhile people. There are scores of websites that have popped up over the past couple of years to help solve this problem. Here are the five best sites we’ve used for finding the most relevant people to follow on Twitter.
 

Twellow is one of the best of the Twitter directories. It’s easy to use and search. You can add yourself to their directory and search through more than 17 million Twitter profiles. The site is organized by categories, which makes it even easier to find new people to follow. It also allows new people to find you.

 WeFollow is my favorite of the Twitter directories. Organized by self identified hashtags, WeFollow allows you to find not only the most popular people in a category, but the most relevant as well. Since spammers can often be the most popular, it’s good know who people are actually listening to and talking with.

Twubble is a bit different. It recommends people for you to follow based on the people you are already following, recommending users that they’re following. This site works pretty well if you only have a few followers and want to get more, but if you have several thousand followers, it doesn’t work as well.

 Who Should I Follow looks at who you follow and makes recommendations based on popularity and location. You can adjust a slider to focus the results. The results were filled with people I would be interested in following and I ended up finding some great new contacts. 

It’s hard to recommend a Twitter people search site since Twitter severly limits bio information, but Tweepz does a great job of dealing with those limitations. Do a search of a keyword, location or a name and Tweepz pulls in the results. You can refine your search by the number of followers, following, language or additional keywords. 
 

Which directories are you using?

Stefan Halley is the Digital Project Leader for The Duffy Agency. He loves to talk about social media.

Comments

[Monica]

How about Mashable's pretty good lists of people in different industries?

E.g. http://mashable.com/2009/08/13/twitter-foodies/