I’ve had a few people who are new to Twitter recently ask me how to find people to follow, so thought it would be useful to share my experiences and also share a new resource I found this morning.

Most of the people I currently follow are either people I already knew were using Twitter (usually via mentioning it on their blog), or people I have found through them. When I first joined Twitter, I used other librarian’s lists to see who they were following. The likelihood is that I might also find some of the people they are following of interest. It’s amazing how quickly you can build up more contacts this way; each new person you follow leads you to a whole new group of potential twitterers to follow. Some of these people I had already heard of but didn’t realise they were on Twitter, others were people I didn’t know but found their updates interesting. I don’t tend to add anyone who has protected their updates unless I know who they are, purely because if I can’t see their updates I don’t know if they are relevant to me.

Since I established a core list of people to follow, I haven’t actively looked for others but if they have added me and I find their updates interesting I have tended to also follow them. I don’t want my Twitter list to become unmanageable so I don’t want to follow too many people and don’t check it often enough to follow those who post very regularly, otherwise I’d get completely swamped in unread tweets.

If you have no idea where to start when finding people to follow, you may find Just Tweet It a useful resource (found thanks to David Rothman)

Just Tweet It screenshot

Just Tweet It screenshot

Just Tweet It is a directory of twitter users categorised into different areas, one of which is librarians. I’ve added myself to the Twittering Librarians directory, and I’ll have to take a look a some on the list that I’m not currently following. There are plenty of other categories so you’re sure to be able to find people to follow from there. I’ll definitely be recommending this resource to anyone new to Twitter looking for people to follow to start them off. It may also be useful to add youself to the directory so that others can find you.

Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a category for twittering libraries (although there are some listed in the librarians directory), but there is a Museums directory.

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