For starters, use to look for certain keywords of interest. After you search, the results will show people who are tweeting those terms; then you can scan their public profiles to see if you should be following them. This can also help in your content strategy (more on that in the next section).

"From all the job success stories I've heard of [on Twitter], one thing remains consistent: you have to build your follower list on Twitter before you need them," says Dan Schawbel ( ), a personal branding expert, and author of the upcoming book .

This message rings true to Aaron Mentzer ( ), who found his job as director of communications at , a Web-based company in Provo, Utah that provides mental and emotional health services. Through Twitter, he met many locally based PR professionals and initiated conversations over industry topics.

"At one point I arranged to meet several of my Twitter colleagues for lunch, so we could meet in person and establish a 'real' connection," Mentzer says. "A month or so after our lunch meeting, one of the colleagues I met on Twitter recommended me to a prospective client as a possible fit for them. I met with that company the next day, where they offered me a job on the spot."

If you begin following people in your industry and you'd like to follow them back, make thoughtful replies to their tweets by putting the "@" sign in front of their Twitter user name. Just like on , we all tend to look when our name gets mentioned.