Free Twitter for Dummies by Laura Fitton, Michael Gruen, Leslie Poston Page B

Following You
    You may also want to see who’s following you on Twitter — maybe you want to find new people to follow, or you’re just curious who’s reading your tweets. You can pull up the list of your followers on any Twitter page. Find the sets of numbers in the upper-right sidebar labeled Following, Followers, and Updates, and click Followers.
    Similar to the Following link (which we talk about in the preceding section), it brings up a list of people who are following you. Twitter sorts the list with the people who’ve started following you the most recently at the top.
    Just like the Following list, you have to click through the Followers list page by page. Chapter 9 suggests some tools, such as TwitterKarma ( http://dossy.org/twitter/karma ) and FriendorFollow ( http://friendorfollow.com ), that can show you both who you’re following and who’s following you, which is considerably easier than scrolling through your followers page by page.
    If you don’t want to have to constantly use a site such as FriendorFollow to keep up with your followers, you have several options:
    Turn on e-mail notifications in the Settings area. Click the Notices tab, check the Email When Someone Starts Following Me check box, and click Save. The e-mail notification authorizes Twitter to send you an e-mail alerting you about each new follower. Then, you can just click a link in the e-mail to that user’s profile and see right away whether you want to follow them back.
    Try to send a user who may be following you a direct message. If she is following you, you’re able to send that direct message. If that user isn’t following you, you get a User Does Not Follow You error message (as shown in Figure 3-7). Then you have to decide whether you want to try to get that user’s attention in another way. Be sure to check for the Action message on her actual Profile page when you do so, as the Direct Messages interface has been buggy in the past.
    Figure 3-7: A notification of a direct message failure.

    Looking at What You’ve Tweeted
    You can see what you’ve tweeted in the past in a variety of ways. The first place to check is your own profile: Click the Profile link in the top-right corner navigation bar (or just click your avatar) to open your Profile page. Your Profile page, in addition to displaying your short bio and profile information, displays a feed of all your public tweets in chronological order. Just like the pages showing your followers and who you follow (which you can read about in the preceding sections), you can keep clicking the More button on the bottom of the page to see older posts.
    Also, your profile is a publicly accessible URL. If your username is @dummies , navigate to http://twitter.com/dummies to jump directly to your Profile page.
    If you’re looking for a specific tweet, you can first look for it by using Twitter’s search page ( http://search.twitter.com ). Do a search for your username — if it’s a common name, you might want to include the @ — plus a keyword from the tweet. The tweet you’re looking for is most likely in the search results. Figure 3-8 shows a Twitter Search results page.
    Tracking trends
    If you’re interested in searching for more than just what you’ve tweeted about yourself, you can see what the rest of the world is tweeting about on Twitter’s Search page and in the new Trending Topics part of the Home screen sidebar. Go to http://search.twitter.com , and below the Search button, you see a list of links to “trending topics.” If a new movie is coming out, or the World Series is on TV, or a major news event is happening somewhere in the world, you’re likely to see it as a trending topic. Sometimes the trending topics can introduce you to topics of conversation you didn’t even know about.
    If you protect your updates, searching by using Twitter Search doesn’t work because the tweets aren’t indexed in the search engine. It’s a small price to pay for