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A kinder & gentler strategy for finding quality twitter follows & followers.

Note: The First Follow strategy posted here has been rendered ineffective due to changes by Twitter in how the following-follower page URL is generated.  Nuts Twitter! In the meantime this D.Cortesi tool,  [my first follow] is similar, well sort of.

Originally published at KentBeatty.com on 3.26.09, updated and improved for tweetvalley.com

If you have an established Twitter account and some interesting updates, here is a way of having some fun generating quality follows & followers.  This is NOT automated … just basic human psychology.  All legit twitter users need to be needed and want to follow “like minded” twitterees …

• 1.  Find a user you follow that you really dig, i.e. they are like minded, in the same line of work, interesting, etc. etc., whatever your criteria for judging a twitter user. Now, go to this user’s home page using the standard twitter web viewer.

http://twitter.com/KentBeatty

• 2.  Hit the person’s “following” link. (This displays the “last twenty-one people” this user decided to follow, in the order they followed.)

http://twitter.com/KentBeatty/following

• 3.  Scroll down to the bottom of the page, hit the “next” button. This displays the “second to last twenty-one people” the user has chosen to follow, in the order they followed.

http://twitter.com/KentBeatty/following?page=2

• 4.  Look at the user’s total following number, how many users is this user following, in this case 1,856. Divide 1,856 by 20, that equals 92.8.  Now, let’s go to the page that reveals the first users that this user decided to follow. Take the number you arrived at: (rounded up) in this case 93, and put that number at the end of the URL address in the command line of your browser.    …(cont’d)

http://twitter.com/KentBeatty/following?page=93

• 5.  A quick check … look at the bottom of the list, if the “next” button is visible, hit that until you do not see the “next” button, only the “previous” button. Now, what you see are the first follows of this user when they first set up their twitter account. The user first followed in the example is @logitron. In most cases, there is a strong probability the first 50 or so users that a user first follows are pretty similar. In some cases, these follows are why a user started a twitter account. Follow these yourself and see what happens.
• 6. Now, if you are really jacked up on twitter, do the same thing for this user’s “followers” list. These are the users early followers. Again, a strong probability that these first followers are similar to your interests. Follow these and see what happens. NOTE: The “First Follow” strategy doesn’t seem to work on really huge numbers of follows/followers, (anything above 10,000/20=500 as the URL page number ) not sure why …

Good luck!

David