When starting out on Twitter, one of the first things that people want to know after they have setup their profile and sent out a few tweets is how to find followers. Not just any followers, but followers who would be interested in what they have to offer.

As you may know, one of the ways to get followers is to start following people in hopes that they will follow you in return. So how do you up the odds that people you follow who are interested in your topic will follow you back?

There are several ways to find followers that are likely to follow you back. The key is in looking at the ratio of the person’s followers vs. following. If they have 100,000 people following them, and they are only following 100, chances are you may not make the cut. But if they are following 98,999 people, then more than likely they are utilizing an automation tool that follows everyone who follows them.

3 Free Ways to Find Reciprocal Followers

So outside of clicking on users one by one to see what their following ratio is, how do you find relevant followers who are likely to follow you back?

TwitterCounter
TwitterCounter keeps a historical track of how many people are following Twitter members, including predictions based on those numbers as to what their following will be the next day and 30 days out.

If you visit the TwitterCounter search page and search for your topic such as digital marketing, you will get results based on the information in Twitter member profiles (as opposed to what they tweet, which isn’t always a good indicator of a particular member’s interest). The results show the number of people following each member, the number of people the member follows, and the number of tweets they have sent. If you authorize TwitterCounter to your Twitter account, you can follow people directly from the list by clicking the blue follow link.

Listorious

Listorious allows members to look for lists of Twitter members based on specific criteria. There are lists of Twitter members on most niches. Some example lists include:

• Social Media
• Sports
• Food
• Business

Each list gives the user’s name and their profile description. Simply use your browser’s search feature to highlight particular keywords and check those members to follow. Once you found top people to follow you can do this  through your Twitter account. Also, remember not to follow too many people every day as you can possibly get banned by Twitter for doing so.

Tweepi
Once you authorize Tweepi through your Twitter account, you can enter a Twitter member’s username and Tweepi will bring back the followers of this user and information such as their number of following, followers, tweets, retweets, etc. So find a Twitter member in the same field, preferably with a huge following, but not someone who auto follows back (ie. someone who doesn’t follow many others). This way, you can be (almost) sure that everyone following them is actually interested in their topic, not just in a return follow.

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