Welcome to a new series on Social Networking Tips. The plan is to bring in folks to share their best ideas about social networking. The next person to write up a tip could be you!
Tip:
Search.
Last week hdbbstephen shared another great way to connect with folks on your social networks, search.
I like to create do searches for topics that I am interested in on Twitter, to see what people are saying. Then I go look at their Tweets and reply when I have something to add to the conversation. I have found some cool folks this way, and been invited to write guest posts, etc.
What a great method to not only learn what’s being said about your favorite topics but who’s saying it. The problem is that most folks have never thought to use search.
Let’s see a about one of your choices. How about searching Twitter.
Twitter can be searched best by using search.twitter.com.
It’s that simple really. The search will bring up tweets from most recent back. Searching here is forgiving of periods and the like, and does better with words that aren’t imbedded. However it does find links with the supplied search text. Where I’ve had the most success is finding locals in the St. Louis area. It’s also been useful to find folks interested in my favorite shows and such.
Google doesn’t slack either for searching on social networks, all tweets are indexed. However there are other ways to find great discussions and people on Twitter.
Layered on top of Twitter search is one of my favorite tools, Tweetstats.com. Tweetstats Trend page is a winning way to find out what’s hot and from there who’s talking about it. Want to find out who the biggest talkers are on Twitter, then try twitter_stats. It shows the folks with the most replies.
Back to the basics there though. So you’ve searched, and @sallywhoseit is talking about jumbotron physics, your favorite topic. Now what? Do you just jump in and say something about the topic? Do you introduce yourself first? Do you tweet about them and hope for the best?
My recommendation is that you take two minutes and do a few things first. One, check their Twitter profile out. See if they are perhaps a Jumbotron Physics professor, student, or just like to ride jumbotrons. This will go a long way to steering future conversation. Second, check out their recent tweets. Was this a one of joke comment? Do they talk about this often?
A great way to check their history is to go back to Twitter search and add that person’s ID to the search. Bang. You’ll know if they are an expert, wanna-be, fan, or just making a joke.
From there it’s just a matter of making the proper introduction. Jump in and chat.
Notice I didn’t say follow them, stalk them, or find their email and drop them a note. Just chat. And go away if they get creeped out.
This week, take a few minutes to search for some new contacts by searching Twitter for your favorite topics. Come back and share or write your own blog post. Either way, please do leave a comment and let me know how it goes, or drop me a line on Twitter/@tojosan.
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