By Elmer on October 20, 2009

No man is an island, and this applies to Twitter; you can’t have an account and not get connected with anyone. You need to follow or to be followed so Twitter becomes useful. Otherwise it defeats the purpose of having a Twitter account.

Assuming we know this necessity, the next step is to find appropriate people to follow. For example, if you’re into baking and cooking recipes, you may want to follow Twitter accounts of pastry writers, food bloggers and cooking enthusiasts. The question is, how do we locate them?

Find on Twitter function

This is the most prominent account finder as it is Twitter’s built-in function. It allows you to search for account name, accounts associated with your Yahoo! or Gmail email contacts. You can also invite a friend via email, or get suggestions from Twitter. Overall, this isn’t the easiest way to find accounts because of lack of search options but probably a good way to start.

TweepSearch

Built by Damon Cortesi who created TweetStats and FirstFollow, TweepSearch allows users to search for accounts based on profile and location information, a feature that is not currently supported by Twitter itself. This is definitely more useful than the ambiguous Twitter People Search.

TwitDir

Another Twitter people search engine, with list of “Top” honors in case you are interested to get in touch with top followed, top followers and top Twitter updaters. Its search function allows more options such as search by terms found within usernames or within descriptions. Now if you are into cooking, using the latter option and “cooking”, “baking” or “recipe”, you should now be able to find your desired targets.

Twellow

Twellow is a search engine and a directory rolled into one. Here, you’ll be able to find like- minded tweeps. So if you are into cooking and food related tweets, you can try the list of directories of that topic before diving into search. This is one of the most complete Twitter search applications available.

Tweepz

Tweepz features operator-specific search function that allows users to use them all at one search query. For example, a search for “name:recipe bio:food” will serve results with names containing “recipe” and bio containing “food”. Further filtering of results can be obtained by refining your search based on number of followers, language and more.

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