@rich-brooks — start following the people you want to be followed by. This is what I do, and no, I don’t have followers in the thousands, but most of the ones following me are relevant for me.  

@ptwylie: Which directories to you prefer/recommend?

@devanianjali: Besides following them, do you engage them in any way? I.e., @ them, RT them, etc?

@rich-brooks I like Twellow for the clean interface however, there are others like WeFollow which can help you find the influencers. For topic specific directories  I have used First Issue for the Book trade.

@rich-brooks I think http://manageflitter.com or @ManageFlitter is quite a cool too – you can see you is not following you back, who is inactive, who is talkative, who is quiet and do a bio search.

Another I came across is http://thetwitcleaner.com/ or @twitcleaner – you can click on SCAN ME NOW and get a report on who is “not so interest” “potentially dodgy behavior” and stuff so pretty fun! You also have the option to see how your OWN account looks to Twit Cleaner: mine said “You’re awesome! Keep being your wonderful self – you don’t appear on anyone’s reports” and then gives you tips on how to improve such as it said to me “however your account is starting to get pretty link heavy. This is fine of course, just don’t forget to chat to people too ” – I love it!

I also search using # to see who comes up for my niche target and follow those I would like to follow me and mention them as well and engage with them or put people in touch with others where I think there may be a connection eg @winetasting you should check out @eventscompany as maybe there could be some collaboration there.

Also I always thank people for following me, mentioning me or Retweeting me and say have a nice weekend or something add in a etc and also try when I can to not just mention only the @username but also then mention what they do and why people should follow them so it gives them a bit of a punt… for example “thx for the follow @username – you should check them out as they give great tips on social media for business startups”

@rich-brooks I did what  @devanianjali does when I first started out on Twitter (and when I was building @ SM4NP’s account. I went to the speakers, such as Beth Kanter, and looked through her followers and started following ones I felt were a good fit. For my personal account, I’m just shy of 700 at this post. I reply by DM to most of my followers. There are a few people that I trade conversations with back and forth, such as @ fondalo. Sometimes it just depends on the topic. I did #FF until I started my new job. I do a modified #FF for my association by thanking the week’s RT’ers (is that a word?) and mentions.

@mambamedia Thanks for the heads up on some new Twitter tools.

Looking forward to the article!

I’m not so active on Twitter, so I can’t say this from personal experience… but what about actually using the platform to retweet, communicate, and point out interesting and relevant info? Isn’t that really the whole point? All of the above services are great for getting numbers (there’s also Justretweet.com), if that is what you are after. But if you want a dedicated twitter community, then it makes sense to use the platform in a way that will make people actually want to follow you.

OOps Forgot this! The last two paper.li newspapers were just for fun. However, I’ve met a lot of nice folks and have had one new client through the #startrek Buddy Bulletin.  You just NEVER KNOW, you know, where clients will come from.

Twitter is NOT about the numbers — It’s about the PEOPLE. 

@moinshaikh Very true about building slowly. Looking at my association’s account, we had 1452 followers at the end of October. When I took over in January, we had 1674 (1/28/12) and now it has slowly grown to almost 1800 as of early March. As we learned with the turtle and the hare, slow and steady win the race (well at least sometimes!!)

Stacey Myers (one of Mari’s mods) introduced me to Tweetattacks and it has transformed my twitter experience. You can set it up to follow the followers of people you want to follow or organisations/businesses that fit with your business profile. Then you simply use Manageflitter to offload anyone who isn’t active on Twitter or who doesn’t follow you back (after a week or so). Twitter does have some rules around this but they seem pretty inconsistent. I’ve been getting much more traffic to my website from twitter and more leads on my mailing list. I’ve also had more sales.

I use Bufferapp for scheduling my regular twitter posts and then post some manually when I feel inspired to share something right away or RT something.

Hope that helps.