While I provide specific steps below, what’s most important is that you (1) be a real person (2) and engage people (3) who are interested in your topic. Any way you do these three things is good!
How to find the most influential people willing to help you
Let’s say you’re trying to get ideas on how small charities can improve their fund raisers. You’ve decided to create a #hashtag, and ask people to provide their ideas. But how do you get the word out to enough people to get a significant number of quality responses?
Use the directories
First, look through some Twitter user directories (some great Twitter user directories to check) to find users who might be interested in your topic. Start by searching by keyword and sorting by who has the most followers. Number of followers is not always meaningful by itself, but it provides a handy starting point in gauging who is influential.
Figure out who the most helpful influencers are
You can skip or abbreviate any of these steps that seem too time intensive:
- Create a Twitter list of everyone you are considering.
- Read 2-3 pages of each user’s tweets. Take note of who has conversations with other users and who seems to be most engaged on the specific topic you are interested in.
- Follow the users who seem most engaged with other users, and interested in your topic.
Over time, add and remove folks from your Twitter list of potentially helpful influencers. Check it from time to time to see if anyone stands out—either good or bad—and to find useful information or opportunities to engage. If you’ve decided to follow them, I suggest either removing them from your first “trial” list or—even better—creating a second list and adding your chosen users to it.
► Tip: Some folks subscribe to see whenever they are added to a Twitter list, so this step alone can help get their attention and increase engagement.
Figure out who will be most responsive to your request for help
To do this, engage the users you have selected by first being helpful to them:
- RT something they have tweeted that they seem to feel needs to find a wider audience.
- Search for tweets of theirs that ask a question and respond helpfully if you can (example search for tweets from a user with a question) and/or comment on or ask them about a tweet they’ve written.
- Tweet something about them. By accurately and positively sharing information about them with your followers, you are helping them to widen their reach and deepen their engagement with like-minded people.
These are just a few suggestions: there are plenty of ways to engage others on Twitter.
How to tweet your request for help
Through this process of engagement they have learned more about you, and recognized you are a real and engaged person.
And you will have learned who would be most responsive to your request for assistance. Start by:
- Tweeting a general request for help, not directed at a particular user. Wait a few hours to see who responds, if anyone.
- Tweet via @ msg—not via DM—your request for help to the most-likely-to-help user you’ve found so far, repeat with the second-most-likely-to-help user, etc.
- Space out your tweets by at least 45 minutes, and don’t tweet more than 4 requests for help in one day. This isn’t a hard-and-fast rule, but the more you spread out specific requests, the less annoying it is
The more frequently you tweet in general, the more frequently you can mix in @ messages requesting help from others. But unless your need is urgent, the more you space it out, the better.
Be real and engage people interested in your topic
These steps are just a rough guide to get you started. Any way you achieve real engagement with the right people is a good thing 
Here’s another good article on how to get engaged on Twitter. For finding folks you might be interested in, you can also try Twitter’s Suggestions for You service.
Have a question or suggestion?
If you’d like more information or have ideas to share, leave a comment! I respond to all requests for help
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
These are all excellent suggestions. It’s good to see these great ideas all articulated in a single place!
Thanks, Ed. I’ve found a lot of folks want to engage but they look for a shortcut or throw up their hands and say “I don’t understand Twitter,” when it’s really just applied common sense.
I think you guys once mentioned your policy of retweeting your posts, but I haven’t been able to find that discussion again. I’m wondering if you have your retweeting automated or if you do it manually. I’ve been trying to figure out how I might be able to retweet my @TwitrLit tweets automatically just so I can increase the chances that followers will see them. But I haven’t figured it out yet.
First, realize that Twitter doesn’t like you to repeat your posts. So you need to vary them if you are going to repeat the same link more than once. Also, we retweet key posts a few times a year, at most. Our focus is more on finding new content. EVERYTHING we do is done manually. It’s the only way to maintain the highest quality
But: I’ll tell you a secret I’ve never written about nor seen anyone else write about. If you want to *frequently* retweet your own posts but not be too noticeable when you do, schedule them every 13.5 hours plus some multiple of 24.
For example, for frequent retweeting, schedule them every 37.5 hours (13.5+24). For approximately weekly retweeting (168 hours in a week), schedule them every 181.5 hours (one week plus 13.5 hours).
This formula creates the longest time before your tweets will appear at the same time of day again, and also spreads them out from appearing at *nearly* the same time of day for a long time.
People tend to check Twitter at similar times, so this will help prevent your tweets from being seen by the same people over and over, even though you are repeating the same tweets over and over.
However: we don’t do this ourselves. Each day we do repeat a few of the most popular tweets ONCE, with a few rare exceptions. The most popular tweet we ever had we decided to repeat a third time (last year). It got nearly 25,000 clicks total! (According to HootSuite stats.)
As far as automating: Use an app with scheduling capability like HootSuite, SocialOomph, FutureTweets, etc. Make a plan and get as many tweets scheduled in one sitting as you can, to be the most efficient. If you don’t vary the content of the tweet sufficiently, the Twitter API will reject them, and the app will give you a message to that effect.
Thanks for all this, Dave! I think I may have to abandon the idea. My idea was simply to retweet each tweet once, maybe four hours after the original tweet, and then never again, while adding an r/t to the front. But maybe that wouldn’t be sufficiently different text for Twitter, and given the nature of the tweets (first lines from books), I wouldn’t otherwise be changing up the tweet. I wouldn’t be able to do it manually because I’d want it tweeting at particular times every day.
Ah well. Meanwhile, I love what you’re doing! I use Twitterific on my iPod Touch, and it has a great bookmarking feature, stuff you save to read later. 75% of what’s saved to read at greater length is from TweetSmarter.
Thanks, Debra! That’s exactly what we try to share, stuff everyone is reading/bookmarking…or will be
Adding only an “r/t ” is enough for HootSuite 99% of the time, but works less often on SocialOoomph. Haven’t tested that on SocialOomph for a few months though. @GuyKawasaki’s trick is to change the short URL only on each repeated tweet, and to tweet the same thing 3-4 times.
We purposely add the “r/t ” at the beginning so people who read ALL of our tweets can see which ones to skip, and don’t have to try to remember if they’ve seen it before.
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