Be my new Twiend? Not ever again!

I’ve been trying out some tools to enhance my Twitter experience. I have been using Tweetdeck and Twitter for iPad for a while and like them for tweeting, but when you are looking for experts to follow on topics of interest, for me on “HR” and “future of work”, it´s not so easy to find them. You can certainly look at the Lists that other people have put together, but that is a lot of work as you have to now the names of the Lists in order to find them.

So when last week I decided to expand my list of people I follow on Twitter to include more HR experts I went looking for a tool to help me accomplish this. I performed some online searches, and found various tools that let you add people to your list. One of the tools, Twiends (formerly TwitterFollower), promised to do just that. It also advertises to be the number one tool to grow your online following. Twiends has a good number of online reviews and many of them are favorable, so I decided to give it a try. After all, what is not to like about increasing your network? A whole lot as it turns out.

Signing up is a simple process and adding Twitter to your Twiends account is easy (you can also add Facebook). Twiends works with credits. If you decide to follow someone you receive credits for that and when other people decide to follow you, credits are deducted from your account. Your sign-on bonus is 15 credits, which is good for 7 followers, as the minimum price is 2 credits. You can increase the price to e.g. 3 credits, but as it turns out, that is not necessary at all. When you set your country, you get another 40 credits added to your account, but I decided to hold out on that until I discovered the real value of Twiends. That was a really good decision.

Twiends lets you add categories to your account. In my case, I added Human Resources. That category contains dozens of Twiends, but I could not find them anywhere. Now I know that HR-people usually don’t have a lot of credit, so my best guess is they ran out of credits and as a consequence did not appear as Twiends to select.

So, what was the result of my Twiends adventure? Well, here it is: the minute I added my Twitter account to Twiends, my credit dwindled down to zero and I had 8 credit-hungry followers. Funny thing was that 10 more added themselves, so within a few minutes I had 18 additional followers. All very qualified and experts in their field, tweeting about interesting topics such as “what is your plan for today”and “enjoying my tea… what about you?”. At least these were harmless fun. There were also the ones tweeting links to commercial pages, trying to sell me stuff and the religious fanatic trying to convert me. No HR in any of that.

After spending 30 minutes on Twiends, I decided to remove my account completely and write it off as a learning experience. I am relieved to say that the next day almost all of my Twiends followers had removed themselves from my Twitter account, surely because I did not follow them back. I guess the remaining few won’t hold out much longer as they hold no interest in the topics that I tweet about. In the meantime, I have been doing some deeper digging (which I should have done in the first place) and found some worthwile resources on HR-experts using Twitter. TalentHQ.com has published a list of Top 25 HR Pro´s on Twitter that contains some good names to follow and then there is HRtweeps.com that aggregates HR related tweets. You can look at the lists that @TalentAnalytics has composed and there is also the Top 100 Influencers in HR list. Far better quality than anything you get at Twiends.

Do you know of any good resources that aggregate HR or Future of Work Tweeters? Please add them as a comment.