I was trying to figure out what to write this week. I was reading some social media blogs and nothing jumped out at me. Then I decided to take another route. I wanted to find an environmental nonprofit organization that was doing something unique with Twitter and highlight their project. I started by typing “environment and twitter” into Google. The first result was for a profile @environment, on Twitter. I was interested in whose profile this was, so I clicked on the profile.

@environment’s profile was not at all what I expected it to be. I expected it to be a place for people to learn about environmental issues. Instead I found 173 followers who are following no one. @environment has never posted anything on Twitter. The page is not branded and @environment’s icon is the standard one you get when you open a Twitter account.

I wanted to know more about these people that were following a blank page. In my head, this page was analogous to a seat reserved sign. Someone signed up for Twitter and wasn’t quite ready to use this name, so they are saving it. But in the mean time people are finding it and waiting for the content.

I did a little research to try and answer the two questions that were running through my head. 1) Who are these people? 2) Why are they following someone that has nothing to offer?

I started my investigation by scrolling thought the followers and comparing these people to the 700 people that I (@aaanimals) follow and the 250 people that @theGMT follows. I thought that there would be overlap. I think that the majority of the people I follow describe themselves as green in some way, shape or form. I made the assumption that people following @environment would also consider themselves green. I know for a fact that I do not follow every green person on Twitter but I thought that with the 700 people I am following plus the 250 people that @theGMT is following, I would have a decent cross section of the green tweeters. To my surprise, we only had three people in common.

Either I don’t follow an accurate cross section of green tweeters or these people had a way to find each other that I don’t use to find people on Twitter.

My focus is on land use, food production and wildlife. It’s possible that I do not get a good overview of the green community on Twitter because I focus on these topics.

But I could not find a common link between @environment’s followers. The followers are located all over the world. They included organic companies, IKEA green, magazines and people that just care about the environment. I don’t think that these people make up a specific section of the green tweeters, since there wasn’t a defining sub topic these people all tweet about. I think they all used the same type of search to find each other.

My first guess was a Twitter search and not a Google search, like the one I had originally conducted. When you go to “find people” on Twitter and you type in environment, the first result isn’t @environment. @environment doesn’t show up until the second page. These results are listed in order of most followers for Twitter accounts with environment in the handle or name. Since @environment only has 169 followers they didn’t show up on the first page. However, 4 of the 20 people on the first page are following environment. That ratio is significantly higher than all of my followers.

This experiment highlights the importance of exploring Twitter and using different types of searches to find people to follow.

How I find people to follow:

• Run Twitter searches for keywords and hashtags that I find interesting and then follow the people that post on these topics.
• Find out who the people I follow are following and follow them.
• Find out who the people that follow me are following and follow them.
• When someone I follow retweets or recommends someone I follow that person.
• Search for people with common interests on Wefollow.

To get a more comprehensive search of green tweeters you should also search for people using the “find people” search option.

There are several other Twitter directories:

Twibs

Twellow

Media On Twitter