Twitter for Dummies by Laura Fitton, Michael Gruen, Leslie Poston

for in the text box.
    2. Add site:Twitter.com at the end of your search query.
    3. Click the Search button.
    See what pops up! Figure 5-2 shows the results of a search for Lance Armstrong.
    Figure 5-2: The Google results of a Twitter user search for Lance Armstrong.

    You probably want to conduct people searches and keyword searches periodically to make sure that you continue to cultivate your Twitter experience’s richness and value with new voices. Although Twitter is great for reconnecting with old friends and keeping up a conversation with existing business associates, it’s also a fantastic way to reach out and find new people and companies to listen to.
    A great way to get started following people on Twitter is to import your contacts from your Web-based e-mail account (like Yahoo! Mail or Gmail). We cover this in detail in Chapter 2.
    Inviting people personally, through Twitter
    Another option for inviting people to Twitter is to do it personally, directly to their individual e-mail addresses. You can find this tab (Invite By Email) on the Find People page (as shown in Figure 5-3), and it gives you a way to hand-pick people from your e-mail address book. You can also text Twitter at 40404 at anytime with the words invite [email protected] substituting in your friend’s e-mail address, of course.
    Keep in mind that Twitter doesn’t offer you a chance to customize what the e-mail says. The person or company you invite gets a generic e-mail that mentions your Twitter handle and some basic information about how to sign up for an account. If you have people you want to invite to Twitter whom you think may not respond well to a generic e-mail, you can use the method described in the following section to invite them, instead.
    Figure 5-3: The Twitter Invite By Email screen.

    The main drawback to any of the invitation options in Twitter’s Web interface is that none of them offer a custom message option. If you know people whom you want to invite, and you think they’d respond better to a private or more personalized note, just shoot them a normal e-mail that includes a link to the Twitter main page ( www.twitter.com ) and a note about why they might benefit from signing up and joining in. It’s often more effective to e-mail them a link to an article that is going to help them understand what uses of Twitter they may find valuable. Twitter is definitely a minute-to-learn, lifetime-to-master type of system.
    A community leads
    Twitter users have come up with an interesting way of recommending people to follow — something called FollowFriday. It uses a community-driven system called hashtags, which we cover in Chapter 9. Our friend Micah Baldwin ( @micah , pronounced Me-ha ) started it, and he has this to say about it:
    In January of 2009, I sent a simple tweet: “I am starting FollowFridays. Every Friday, suggest people to follow, and everyone follow him/her. Today its @jeffrey and @dannynewman .” After a suggestion to add the hashtag #followfriday and four folks retweeting it, FollowFriday was born.
    After a few months, more than 100,000 tweets with more than 300,000 recommendations are sent each Friday (it actually begins on Thursday U.S. time because it’s Friday overseas!) and it’s growing each week.
    FollowFriday mirrors what happens in the real world. One person suggests a book to read, or a restaurant to go to, or a person you should meet, and if you trust them, you take their word. The concept is very simple: Write a tweet listing two or three people you follow that you think others should follow as well, and provide a bit of an explanation. ( Remember: It’s only 140 characters,so be brief both with your recommendations and with your explanations!) For example, “@pistachio @micah @gruen are three people that make me laugh every day. #followfriday .” That’s it!
    If you’re new to Twitter and you’re looking for people to follow, you can search for #followfriday at