Who are you following?

Twitter, the micro-blogging site, is now a global phenomenon, with everyone from politicians to celebrities tweeting (a term used to post messages of up to 140 characters) regularly. While most users are obsessed with the number of followers they have, an important factor is ‘who are you following.’

Twitter is an open-ended status update network that allows you to connect with users across the world. So, while previously it wasn’t that easy to find who are tweeting, as twitter API is open i.e. developers can build apps over the data that twitter has, more and more apps have solved this issue.

Here are two applications to help you do that:

http://followerwonk.com
Followerwonk allows you to search profiles of Twitter users, coupled with their location. So, if you are searching for graphic designers in New Delhi, you can easily find them through this tool. This tool becomes super-effective in finding real people with real expertise and connecting with them in real time. This way it works for both, brands and individuals. A budding photographer could connect with international photographers through this tool or an entrepreneur could connect with other entrepreneurs within his or her city.

http://search.twitter.com/advanced
How does one go about searching people with interests or topics they don’t mention in their profile? The answer is this advanced version of Twitter search — http://search.twitter.com/advanced.

The advanced twitter search has two key options — one is the keyword and the other is the location. Based on these two options, one can search what people are tweeting in a specific location. So, in case you are searching for football enthusiasts, you can search with keywords like ‘football’ in ‘Mumbai’.

The advance search also provides searching tweets with a positive or a negative sentiment that gives further filtration if you are a brand. Of course, this search does throw up zero results if you have too many filters or irrelevant results if you have entered a vague query. The trick is to use the advanced search for a bit and try to figure out the best number of fields that throw the top results for your search.

Both applications when used in unison can find you the exact type of person you are looking for on Twitter. So, whether you are an environmentalist or an upcoming rock band artist, this tool shall help you connect with more of your kind and those not of your kind as well.

Rajiv Dingra is a digital media analyst and a social media strategist since five years. He founded the digital media blog WATBlog.com