I was late to the Twitter game and I’m glad I finally got into it. The Linkbuildr Twitter account has steadily been growing and I’ve been trying to find new ways to get more subscribers, and that has led me to write this post. Besides having chiclets, banners, buttons and other on page methods of getting people to your Twitter account there hasn’t been much options outside of that for attracting attention.

Twitter Search Engines:

There are a number of Twitter search engines out there and they are a great way to find people that are interested in the same topics as you. You can either search for your favorite bloggers, or search for the top keywords around your niche and subscribe to all those people. Keeping this up will encourage them to follow you back.

Search.Twitter.com – the original search provided by Twitter lets you search for people and topics easily. If you click on the advanced search button you’ll get a nice set of search features that rival Google’s advanced search. You not only search by name and topic, but you can also search by location, date, language and if the post includes a url link.

TwitterTroll.com – a  real time Twitter search engine that indexes popular people and topics and is all about finding like minded people. As of today their are only 58706 Twitter users indexed in the search engine, and the crawl rate has been set to low a lot lately. I imagine this app is starting to take its toll on the server.

Twellow.com – is not only a Twitter search engine, but it is also a directory for people broken down by category. It is pretty much a web directory for Twitter users and you can find more Twitter directories like this down the post a bit. This site is great for finding like minded people in your niche or industry.

Twidentify.com – this is a search engine for Twitter users that get retweeted the most. This is great for finding like minded people because you can see others discussion topics you’re into, and that includes their opinions.

Twithority.com – is an authority based Twitter search engine for finding the most popular people on the site. The site kind of makes a mini magazine based on the content on Twitter and popular users tweets get displayed on the main page. Twithority also tracks the hottest trends based on searches so you can get an idea of what to blog about, or retweet.

Twitter Alerts:

Twitter alerts are a great way of keeping up on topics being tweeted and give you a chance to find more people in your niche. They act the same way as google alerts which are great for the same reason in the blogosphere. There have been a few sites for this popping up lately so it must be catching on.

Twilert.com – is an easy interface to get alerts for a topic when it hits the tweet street. Just put in your Twitter details and keywords to watch and you’ll get updated via email when someone talks about a topic you’ve requested to watch.

Tweetbeep.com – has been down since the end of December, but it still ranks number 1 on google for Twitter Alerts. I’m not sure when it will be back up, but when it does it’s worth checking out because it worked well. Nice slick interface and the alerting system always worked up until now.

TwitterAlerts.com – this site is a really simple sign up and track your keywords app that has been around almost the lonest. All you need to give them is the email to send the alerts to, your username and password.

Twitter Forums:

Twitter forums have been popping up all over the place and it is a great way to not only interact with other Twitter users, but its a great way to show off your account and attract new readers. I never would have suspected forums for Twitter would take off and so far it seems that I’m right. All the forums listed below are very inactive, but only time will tell.

TwitTown.com – is the largest forum for all your Twitter addicts out there and only has a few active posts going on. This site used to be hosted under the domain Twitterforums.com but decided to move for some reason. There are only a couple hundred users.

Twitplace.com – has only 13 members and is decently new so I don’t know what to say as of yet. Since Twitter is pretty much a large unorganized chat forum it must be hard to get something like this going.

Tweetbars.com – is not a forum but fits under the topic at hand. TweetBars lets you easily implement your tweets into your Email, Website and in your forum signature. It is basically Twitter meets Forum Signatures as they’ve coined it already on their website. Interesting little app to play with in my opinion.

Twitter Directories:

I have noticed a few Twitter user directories popping up and they are getting quite populated already. I imagine we’ll see more so I hope I can remember to keep updating this post. If anyone has anything I missed be sure to contact me or leave a note in the comments.

Twitdir.com – is the premier Twitter directory and unfortunately was down for maintenance at the time of writing. It features a directory broken down by interest so it makes finding Twitter users really easy. Be sure to add yourself into the mix and approval normally takes 1-5 days.

Twellow.com – is one I already mentioned under Twitter search engines, but it is also a directory for users. You can submit your Twitter account and once it is loaded up you can confirm the listing by entering in your password. Another bonus is that the URL you have listed in your Twitter profile gets listed here as well, but it’s do follow! Check out the Linkbuildr profile on Twellow.

TwitterPassion.com – is another less SEO friendly Twitter user and topic directory that has a good amount of people listed, including celebrities. You can submit your link and although it is not auto approved, should only takes a few days to get listed in the directory.

JustTweetIt.com – is one of the newer Twitter directories on the block and has a huge user base already. I’ve added myself to the SEO/Internet Marketing category and I really like how the listings are displayed. Submission was auto approved and the link to your Twitter account is do follow, but any links you put in your description are no follow.

I hope this helps some of you grow your Twitter accounts because they can be a great place to leverage sales, get traffic and make some new friends. Again I’ll mention to contact me or post in the comments anything I missed that would be a great addition to this post. I would also like to hear how some of you snagged a lot of Twitter subscribers.