Jan 14
Cool Tool Alert: Twiangulate
This seems to be a great tool to find common connections between you and someone you follow or want to follow on Twitter. If you’re looking for a tool to help find great people to follow, give Twiangulate a shot.
“Twiangulate is a tool for discovering hidden tweeters, friends of friends (or friends of enemies), micro-influentials who only insiders follow… or sometimes just friends you haven’t yet realized are tweeting.” So basically, this is an automated discovery version of Twitter lists. But unlike lists, these groupings aren’t generated subjectively by individuals – the results are generated by algorithms and other complicated tech things designed by Henry Copeland, Kaley Krause, and Jessica Siracusa among others.
Here’s how it works: you can auto-authenticate your Twitter account to get started, and then enter up to 3 usernames of people whom you follow or would like to explore. I chose to start with just one person whom I highly respect for this example:
Caution: if you choose people who are popular, you may have to run them one at a time or else you’ll get an error message.
As a result, this is what was returned – three people who are mutual connections of ours, as well as a long list of others that Twiangulate found to be the most influential people whom these folks follow. The provided list may be sorted by # of followers, # of people whom they follow, or by location as well:
While this is certainly a fun tool for finding new, interesting people to follow – think about it from a sourcing or recruiting standpoint. What if you were to plug in the Twitter account for say, an alumni group, or a professional association that tweets? You could then get a list of the most influential Twitter accounts followed by those people…
Example: @NACEorg- not a huge account, but one of interest to me, because according to the bio, “The National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) is the leading source of information on the employment of the college educated.” So I plugged it into Twiangulate and here’s what I got – some pretty interesting new accounts that I should be following and interacting with:
Go ahead and give it a shot yourself. You might be surprised at the individuals who come up that you should have been following all along!
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Thank you for your great write-up! We’ve wondered whether there was a recruitment angle — so we’re thrilled to hear you think Twiangulate helps you. We’ve got a couple of new twists in the works that should help too.
Somehow we need to make it more obvious that you can grab the actual link to a specific Twiangulation. For example, the link for the search you mentioned is http://www.twiangulate.com/search/NACEorg
And here’s another useful one: http://www.twiangulate.com/search/researchgoddess-sgordon70-JohnSumser/
The “watch list” idea might also interest you. You can use it to get notified when new people are followed by a particular combination of 2 or 3 tweeps. Once you’re logged in, you can see “Add to my watch list” at the top of each combination you’re searching.
I love this! Also handy for a person (like me) who is moving to a new city and wants to build a social and professional network in that city. Searching through all the Twitter directories can be quite time consuming.
[...] Twiangulate A review by Amybeth Hale (aka @researchgoddess) of this tool to help you find great people to follow on Twitter. [...]