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by: John Child
When most people sign up for Twitter, the first questions they usually ask are, “How do I find
people to follow?” and then, “What do I talk about when I’m on there?”
The good thing is that both of those questions can be answered by engaging yourself into some
popular topics of conversation on Twitter. When you talk about what everyone else is talking about
- you inevitably find a great bunch of friends to follow, who in turn are eager to follow you.
So what are the best sites for finding the hot topics of conversation? They are TweetScan, Twitter
Search, and HashTags.
TweetScan (http://www.tweetscan.com) is a
very simple site which allows you to find people who are talking about what you want to talk about.
You simply enter a search term, for example, “yoga”, and it searches for the latest tweets that
have the word “yoga” in them.
Now that’s pretty broad, so you may want to be more specific, let’s say, “beginning yoga”, and it
will find those two words within a single tweet. You then simply click on the tweet that interests
you, and you can simply follow, or respond to those tweets if you want to.
TwitterSearch (http://search.twitter.com)
is the official area from Twitter to search for topics of conversation. The interesting thing is
that most people don’t know about it. Once again, in typical Twitter fashion, the site is very
basic, with a simple search box, which searches for tweets based on the topic you are looking
for.
However, one advantage to TwitterSearch is that they do have an advanced search link, which when
clicked, allows you to fine tune your search for exact phrases, or other parameters such as places.
This feature comes in handy when you want to find people talking about “hiking” for example, but
you would also like to find people in your surrounding area talking about hiking. That way, you may
have something more to add to the conversation.
HashTags (http://www.hashtags.org) is a very
helpful site as well because it shows what some of the hot topics are, and allows you to search for
those topics. The key difference here is that you’re looking for topics designated by the hashtag,
“#”. Whenever you see a ‘#’ sign in front of a word, it is put there for the benefit of knowing
that is a tweet about a certain topic.
When you search for the word “scrapbook”, on the other sites, it simply means that someone has
mentioned the word “scrapbook”, and may not necessarily be into the topic of “scrapbooking”. But
when you add the hashtag, and search for “#scrapbook” then you’ll only find those who are talking
about that topic.
You may think, well don’t I always want to search for hashtags then? Not necessarily. Keep in mind
that Twitter is growing at an alarming rate, and many, many people have no idea what hashtags even
are, so don’t expect everyone to be using them.
The other benefit to the HashTags site is that it will also let you know what the hottest topics
currently are on Twitter, based on the number of tweets using that tag.
Do not be shy about following people that are talking about what you like to talk about. And when
you find those that have thousands of followers, you especially want to follow them. You’d be
amazed at how you start getting followers to you like wildfire.
About The Author John Child is a professional speaker, author and trainer. He has conducted
Internet Marketing seminars around the country and other parts of the world for companies like
Microsoft, Success Magazine, eBay, and many others. He is the author of books and training programs
such as "Selling the Web", "Virtual Downlines", and "The Strategic Web". His latest training
specializes in teaching Network Marketing and MLM professionals how to use Social Networking to
build their business online. You can learn more and read John's blog at http://www.mysocialnetworkmarketing.com .
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