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Top 237 Twitter Users Who Will Follow You Back

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100,000+ Followers

50,000-100,000 Followers

40,000-50,000 Followers

30,000-40,000 Followers

20,000-30,000 Followers

10,000-20,000 Followers

How to Use this List

Regardless of what stage you are in Twitter, if your goal is to accumulate active followers, the people on this list are good for that.? Most on the list are active and interact with their followers on a daily basis. They retweet to their followers when they find something interesting on or off Twitter and many of them post high-quality tweets.

Some do not, and you’ll be able to identify the spammers and self-serving users from what appears in your stream. This list has not been validated for quality (maybe a future blog post) but rather to help new and experienced users grow their followers.

Unfortunately, I did the list backwards. Anyone who wants to grow their Twitter account should start from the bottom and work their way up, adding all 237 either all at once or spread out over time. The advantage of adding from this list is two-fold:

Obviously, as these users have demonstrated a willingness to follow those who follow them, it gives you a likely additional follower.

The side-benefit of adding from this list is that once you follow them, your account will, for a short period of time, be at the top of their followers list. Many users build their Twitter followers by adding the followers of users such as these, so being at the top increases your account’s exposure and the number of opportunities for other users to follow you.

This blog does not condone “Twitter Follower Spam” or whatever you would like to call the practice of adding a ton of followers, unfollowing them later, and adding more in a vicious cycle of growth, but hey, it works, and many people do it. This is just a resource to help users at every level build their accounts as quickly as they would like.

13 Best URL Shorteners with Real Time Tracking

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Would you like to instantly keep track of click thru of your links on Twitter page, Facebook or any social networks? These URL shortening services provide real-time (instant, update-to-date) statistics of your links. Some of them provide analytic like hourly clicks, geographic split, etc. Okay, here comes the ultimate list:

1. Bit.ly

Bit.ly is one the most popular URL shortening service on the Internet especially on social networking platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. Not only does its URL is really short as compared to its rival – TinyURL, what’s more is that it offers real-time statistics which are extremely useful for bloggers or webmasters.

2. Tweetburner

Tweetburner allows you to keep track of what happens to the links in tweets shared with you, by you, by your friends and every other twitterer. Besides providing detailed analytics, it even tells you what’s hot on the social networking platform. While there are a variety of ways of seeing what subjects are getting twittered about, such as Tweetdeck’s keyword tag, Twitterburner shows you on its home page the most popular Twurled links clicked in the past hour and the Twitters they came from.

3. Short.ie

Created in 2008, Short.ie is a website that lets you shorten any URLs, store all them all in one place and track how many clicks they’ve received. You can also share this list with friends too. Its amazing recommendation engine can even suggest new relevent content based on what you’re linking to. Short.ie blends well with your Twitter account as you’re able to connect both accounts together to open up further features like stored tweets.

4. tr.im

tr.im is for quick, easy, full-featured URL shortening with integrated posting to social networks such as Twitter, with a free public API. When it comes to link tracking, it provides users detailed analytics such as when they happened, the visitor’s location, the refering website, and, simply, the number of clicks that it got.

5. notlong

Unlike any other URL shortening services, NotLong shortens URLs in its sub-domain rather than the sub-directory. For example, a TinyURL link would be http://tinyurl.com/123. On the other hand, a shortened NotLong URL would be http://123.notlong.com. The stats provided are basic with Date, Clicks and Unique IPs and are updated hourly instead real-time.

6. Shorl

The main reason why I don’t prefer using Shorl is because it doesn’t really make any difference whether you compressed a long URL into a short one (exaggerating). For example, a Shorl shortened link would be http://shorl.com/stylulyfinino. What’s more is that viewing the stats requires you to remember the custom password which contains many weird characters. For people who have shortened memory just like me, then it isn’t that useful after all. This free URL shortening service offers simple statistics.

7. YOURLS

Yourls is a simple but pretty impressive URL shortening service cum Wordpress plugin. Most suitable for bloggers or webmasters who use Wordpress as their preferred blogging platform, Yourls is a small set of PHP scripts that will allow you to run your own URL shortening service. You can make it private or public, you can pick custom keyword URLs, it comes with its own API. With this tool, users are able to create short URLs and tweet them automagically as you publish blog posts. It come with a neat AJAXed interface and track click count on your links is supported.

8. YY.VC

YY.VC is yet another URL shortening service that allows users to create short URLs from long ones, share them on social websites and even track them. A YY.VC shortened URL is pretty neat and sweet. For example, http://yy.vc/z5m will brings you to Google.com. It comes with a hit counter that shows you how many visitors have checked out your link. Besides being a URL shortener, this free service also offers free sub-domains which are forwarded to your site instantly and no ads are displayed.

9. Cli.gs

Grabbing a 3% share of the URL shortening market on micro-blogging platform Twitter, Cli.gs gives users a “deep real-time analytics” which includes the geographical location of the visitor, the time, and other stats. Having an account in cli.gs is mandatory since the stats are private. Social media monitoring Cligs keeps track in real time of who tweets your link, who shares it on Friendfeed, who links to it, who blogs about it, who writes a blog comment about it, and more. Not just that, Cligs does that for the destination URL too! All in one handy interface.

10. DwarfURL

To view your stats, you can do so under the “History” tab or enter a password to your dwarfURL link. This is slightly different from Bit.ly as other people aren’t able to see your links’ stats unless you’re using a shared computer or somehow they know your password. DwarfURL comes in a Firefox add-on so that users are able to shortened long URLs with ease.

11. SnipURL

With over 43,856,196 snippings (shortened URLs) being created, SnipURL is another popular URL shortening service. One of the most exciting feature is provides is Multi-Snip. With this, users are able to shortened several long URLs at once without any much hassle. Link tracking is supported too.

12. kl.am

Created by Raven Internet marketing tools, kl.am comes in really handy especially when it comes to traffic statistics. With this URL shortening tool, it benefits bloggers and Internet marketers by giving them graphical statistics such as a line graph and a world map which shows the number of unique visitors in the past 24 hours and the geographical locations of potential readers respectively.

13. BudURL

Shrink it. Spread it. Watch it Grow. This is what BudURL is all about. First you shortened a long URL, share it with your friends or co-workers and view a detailed analytics of your links. It was designed from the start to give small businesses and marketers insight into previously invisible click traffic. You can check out who the referrers are, timestamps and IP addresses.

8 Ways To Find Relevant Followers On Twitter

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Twitter’s strength comes in its ability to connect you with other people and to start real conversations. It’s helped small business owners market to current customers, to engage new ones, and to create partnerships with new friends. But it can only help you to do that if you know how to find the people relevant to you. Otherwise, you spend a whole lot of time talking to yourself.

And unfortunately, that’s what happens to most people.

Finding people you know or who are relevant to you on Twitter is probably a lot easier than you think. There are a great number of tools, directories and searches already available to help you do it. Here are some of my trusty favorites for locating new and interesting Twitter users.

Twitter's Find People

Twitter’s very own Find People option offers several ways to find Twitter users you already know in real life. If you’re using Gmail, Yahoo or an AOL email account to correspond with customers (and you feel comfortable sharing this information), Twitter will go through and find all of your contacts already using the service. This is a very quick way to connect with all your current customers and let them know you’ve found a new home on Twitter. If you don’t feel comfortable sharing your email account information, you can also search for customers, competitors and community friends by name using the people search. It’s a bit more time consuming, but you don’t have to give up the goods.

Twitter Search

Use Twitter Search when you want to search by keywords rather than name, or if you want to find people who are talking about you. By entering in your name, username, important keywords, competitors, clients, etc, you can find all the important conversations going on around your terms and follow the people having them. You may also want to look for local news organizations, as well. By starting up conversations with them on Twitter, it could possible lead to future coverage down the road. Twitter Search lets you find people based on the topics they’re talking about.

Twellow

Twellow prides itself as being “The Twitter Yellow Pages”. It’s a directory that allows you to search for other Twitter users based on interest, category or location. Twitter users are able to claim and fill out Twellow listings, which then become searchable. If you’re a local car repair shop, you could use Twellow to find other mechanics in your area, identify people who list themselves as car fanatics, or to find business owners in parallel fields. Twellow ranks users by the number of followers they have, so the person with the biggest network will rank at the top. To help people find you, you should also fill out your personal Twellow profile and add yourself to the appropriate categories.

WeFollow Directory

WeFollow is a Twitter directory that lets users tag their account with different keywords or interests. For example, if you’re that car mechanic listed above, you can tag yourself with “automobiles”, “cars” and “mechanic” to make it easy for people interested in these things to find you. Of course, you can also search for the same terms in order to find people that you’d be interested in following. Because users can create whatever tags they want, try to add yourself to the relevant communities that have the most followers. For example, [writer] has almost 11,900 different users listed, where as [writers] only has 132. You’d want to list yourself in the first group, rather than the latter one.

Competitors

This is one of the most underrated ways to find some of your most valuable Twitter followers. Do a people search on Twitter to try and track down your known competitors using the service. Once you find them, take a look at whom they’re following and who’s following them. People follow others for very specific reasons. If someone has decided to follow, and especially interact with, one of your competitors, then it’s likely that they’d be interested in following you, as well. You probably also want to follow any user that your competitor seems to spends a large amount of time tweeting to. If this person is important to their business, there may be some overlap in how they can help you. Or, if not, you at least want to be monitoring the conversation.

TwitterGrader

TwitterGrader is incredibly useful for finding interesting tweeters local to you. Once you tell TwitterGrader where you’re located, it will populate a list of the 100 most active Twitterers in your area. You can also use the Advanced Search option to narrow down the list to find people who just joined Twitter in the last week, past five days, etc. Small businesses can often make really great connections simply by talking to the folks who live in a close distance from their storefront. After all, your community is your audience.

MrTweet

MrTweet is an automated system that recommends interesting people for you to follow based on your own Twitter usage. It provides data about each person’s follow/followed ratio, posting rate, degree of conversation and link posting rate. To use the service to find followers, you simply have to the @mrtweet Twitter account and you’ll receive the occasional DM with recommendations on interesting users.

Twubble

Twubble works by going through your Follower list and then jumping one step further to go through your follower’s Followers to create a brand new list of people for you to follow. The idea here is that if someone is following someone that you find to be relevant, that person may find you relevant as well. It’s sometimes hit or miss but I’ve found some pretty active Twitter users this way.

With the rabid popularity of Twitter, there are tons of services out there to help people use the service and locate followers. These are some of my personal favorites.

Followers counts dropping or losing?! Sit back and relax!

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Some of our readers reported to us that their Twitter accounts are losing followers significantly today. Some of them dropping 100 to 500 followers. Sit back and relax. According to Official Twitter Status, they are performing follower and following counts correction. They main reason behind is they are cleaning our spam accounts. So we can do nothing about it. This action could benefit Twitter in long run, hopefully.

From Twitter Status:

For some time, the follower and following counts we display have been incorrect for some folks. We’re soon to push a change that will address this issue. This means that the count you see in your sidebar should match what you see on your follower and following pages.

However, a consequence of this change is that follower counts will drop for some people. In particular, those with large followings may see significant changes as we correct for spam accounts and data inconsistencies. No legitimate followings should be affected—we’re just cleaning up artifacts in the system.

Twitter launches "Twitter 101" with Best Practices for Businesses on Twitter

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Today Twitter launches "Twitter 101" to address the mass business demand of Twitters. A good guideline for business who going to start / just started applying Twitter to their businesses. This is their suggested "Best Practices":

Think about Twitter as a place to build relationships
Instead of approaching Twitter as a place to broadcast information about your company, think of it as a place to build relationships. Put into practice, that means you could do things like:

Include in your Bio and/or custom background the names (or @usernames) of the people twittering from your company account. It’s also a good idea to include additional contact info, like email addresses.

Listen regularly for comments about your company, brand and products—and be prepared to address concerns, offer customer service or thank people for praise.

Use a casual, friendly tone in your messages.

While you shouldn’t feel compelled to follow everyone who follows you, do respond to some questions or comments addressed to you.

If you like a particular message, retweet it. People often appreciate the sharing and amplification of their ideas, so look to retweet cool stuff.

Post links to articles and sites you think folks would find interesting—even if they’re not your sites or about your company.

Make sure your tweets provide some real value. You know better than we do what is valuable, but here are few examples to spark ideas:

- Offer Twitter exclusive coupons or deals
- Take people behind the scenes of your company
- Post pictures from your offices, stores, warehouses, etc.
- Share sneak peeks of projects or events in development

Don’t spam people. Twitter’s following model means that you have to respect the interests and desires of other people here or they’ll unfollow you. The most common way to run afoul of that understanding—and to thus look like a spammer—is to send unsolicited @messages or DMs, particularly when you include a promotional link.

Of course, if you run an account that focuses explicitly on sharing exclusive coupon codes or sale information, you’re probably just fine posting promos. But tread carefully, and consider explaining in your bio or background how the account works.

Tip: You can test the waters by sending just a few promos to start, and then continuing only if people show interest.

To make sure you’re not spamming folks, we also suggest you avoid the following:

Posting duplicate updates to an account: Posting the same update over and over throughout the day is considered spammy and a possible violation of our terms of service.
Cross-posting duplicate updates to multiple accounts: If you post the same update to multiple accounts, you could violate our terms of service.
Following churn: Following and unfollowing the same people repeatedly, as well as following and unfollowing those who don't follow back, are both violations of our terms of service.
Tip: Think you’ve encountered a spammer? Let us know, and we’ll look into the account. You can alert us to spam profiles by sending a direct message to @spam! In addition, you can block the spammer by heading to their account page, and on the right side, clicking the block link (they won’t know you’ve blocked them).

Understand the real-time nature of Twitter
Messages on Twitter are short, quick and able to reach people wherever they happen to be. That combination makes it an instantaneous medium, which has a couple of implications for businesses:

You can ask questions, float ideas and solicit feedback on Twitter—and expect pretty quick replies most of the time.
If you’ve just launched a product, ask users what they think or search for real-time tweets from people talking about your product. You can also ask or search for feedback on new ad campaigns you’ve launched, stores you’ve opened or murky issues you have to handle.
When people raise customer service issues on Twitter, they generally expect a quick reply—within a day, if not within a few hours, depending on the nature of your business. Keep an eye on your @mentions.

Measure the value of Twitter
Before you set up measurement tools, focus on the quality of your engagement, and use your gut to check how things are going. How’s the feedback and interaction with your followers? Are you responding to most or your @messages? Are most tweets about you positive? Or if they started out largely negative, are they coming around? Are more people beginning to engage with you and mention your company?

Next, think about quantifying your experience. Although it can be tricky to add up the value of relationships, Twitter does lend itself to measurement in a few ways—especially if you’ve already defined what you hope will be different for your company in three months, six months or a year if you succeed on Twitter. Tactics like these can then help you assess your progress in meeting that goal:

Keep a tally of questions answered, customer problems resolved and positive exchanges held on Twitter. Do the percentages change over time?
When you offer deals via Twitter, use a unique coupon code so that you can tell how many people take you up on that Twitter-based promotion. If you have an online presence, you can also set up a landing page for a promotion, to track not only click-throughs but further behavior and conversions.
Use third-party tools to figure out how much traffic your websites are receiving from Twitter.
Track click-throughs on any link you post in a tweet. Some URL shortening services let you track click-throughs.

Twitter 101: http://business.twitter.com/twitter101/

Top 237 Twitter Users Who Will Follow You Back

100,000+ Followers

50,000-100,000 Followers

40,000-50,000 Followers

30,000-40,000 Followers

20,000-30,000 Followers

10,000-20,000 Followers

How to Use this List

Sunday, July 26, 2009

13 Best URL Shorteners with Real Time Tracking

Saturday, July 25, 2009

8 Ways To Find Relevant Followers On Twitter

Friday, July 24, 2009

Followers counts dropping or losing?! Sit back and relax!

Thursday, July 23, 2009

Twitter launches "Twitter 101" with Best Practices for Businesses on Twitter

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