There are also search engines that allow you to comb the Twittersphere, which can be a good way to find people you want to follow yourself. By using a Twitter search engine to find people within your target market-both in your geographic area and in your area of specialty-you can turn social networking into a prospecting machine.
Twitter's own search tool is helpful (search.Twitter.com). Also try TweetBeep, which sends you e-mail alerts about topics you want to know about or that your target prospects are likely to be talking about. A promising new site is Twellow (www.twellow.com), which calls itself the Twitter Yellow Pages.
Say you are an advisor in San Francisco and work mainly with college professors. You can use an advanced search tool to search for tweets using the term "professor" within a 20-mile radius of San Francisco. Look at the tweets that are returned from your search and follow the professors you find. If you have been tweeting about financial planning for professors, the professors that you have followed will check out what you are tweeting.
Keep in mind that when you follow a professor, you can see all his tweets. Since professors tend to socialize with one another, you may scour his tweets and find other professors to communicate with. An excellent tool that can do this for you is Twubble (www.crazybob.org/twubble). Another good tool is Twollow (www.twollow.com), which can allow you to automatically follow people who use keywords you define.
Some important ground rules to be aware of on Twitter: When you use a Twitter search engine to find people to follow, many of them will follow you in return. Good social networking etiquette means that you should follow most people who follow you. But you don't have to follow all of them. When someone follows you, you receive an e-mail alerting you with their Twitter name. It's wise to click on the name and look at the last 20 or 30 tweets made by this person. If they are not valuable, don't follow them.
You do risk that the person will stop following you if you do not follow him. Many automatic tools, such as Twitter Karma (www.dossy.org/twitter/karma/), Less Friends (www.lessfriends.com) and Qwitter (www.useqwitter.com) will tell you who has "unfollowed" you.
Creating Content
The way to make people follow you on Twitter now that you've set it up is by offering good content, and what's even better is if you can find an automated way to create it.
Here's one three-step process I came up with: First, create a free Google account and enter a topic on the Google Alerts page with keywords you want to track. If you set up an alert for "Autodesk," for example, Google will automatically tell you when that term is used. You can then use the Google Alerts dashboard to turn the alert into an RSS feed, which will create a unique URL for the feed. Next, you can shorten this URL, which is critical for Twitter's strict 140-character limits, by opening up a free account on bit.ly (www.bitly.com), a Web site integrated with Twitter that condenses long addresses. Lastly, take the shortened URL for your Google feed and create a free account at Twitterfeed (www.twitterfeed.com), which will automatically feed your Google search on Autodesk into Twitter. When you set up your feed, be sure to set Twitterfeed to include only the title information from your RSS feed. Whenever your search term appears with new content, it will automatically create a tweet about it. If you go back to bit.ly to check on your short URLs, you can see statistics about how many people have clicked on it.
Compliance issues are a major concern in using Twitter, and many B-Ds simply won't allow their reps to use it. However, B-Ds will not object to reps sending links automatically using the system I've described here. For more about compliance issues and social networking, you can see a replay of a Webinar about social networking tools and advisor compliance at
www.bitly.com/c5yi9. And be on the lookout for compliance-friendly Twitter tools because they are bound to be created by thoughtful technology companies serving advisors.
New techniques for Twitter are popping up daily. Check my blog at gluck.advisorblogcentral.com for updates and register for my May 8 Webinar, "Twitter For Advisors," at www.bitly.com/12FCRX.