Who are your new followers? People you just met in real life? New potential friends? Future customers?

It helps to keep an eye on who is following or unfollowing you, so that you don’t miss opportunities to meet great new people and future friends. Learning who your new followers are and when they follow you will help you begin cultivating relationships with the new folks entering your social sphere.

Keep track of who is entering your network

There are a few ways to keep an eye on the new followers you’re getting. One way that you can straight from Twitter or a Twitter client like Hootsuite, is to use an automagically updating list, such as the Formulists “new followers” list, to track new followers. 

Start with “hello”, greet by name where possible

Acknowledgment is nice and on Twitter there are countless ways to do it.  If you are getting tons of new followers all the time, the easiest approach is sending one or a few tweets out that mention and say “hello” to all your new followers at once…

It’s the little things

…Of course, the more personal you can get, the more acknowledged and special you will make your new follower feel. It takes all of about two seconds to learn a person’s name on Twitter, and about five to learn a bit about them.  Just click on their name or display pic on Twitter:

Stay in touch

This is where a list of new followers can help you most. This will help you develop a relationship beyond just an initial greeting and really get to know who your new followers are and what they tweet about.  It will also make it easy for you to notice natural and interesting opportunities for engagement.  Wherever you notice a great idea or link, you can start a dialogue and begin building a relationship.

What other tips do you have for getting to know new followers?

Back in 2008, the Washington post covered a really interesting study in which they had one of the most famous and talented musicians in the world, Joshua Bell, play some of his usual concert pieces incognito in a subway.  Almost no one stopped to listen or recognized how beautifully he was playing.

Within the last few weeks- Jay Baer wrote a great post about how, thanks to new media like Twitter, it is much easier to come by information but along with this new speed of information transfer is a wane in more investigative knowledge mining.  

The way I see it, both these touch on the same theme: as the world moves faster and faster with more and more information and stimulation, are we losing touch with what is truly meaningful? Do we now need contextual cues (ie: big names, high Klout scores, crowds etc) to see the quality of what we read and experience?

But we’re busy

In the case of the both the accumulation of knoweldge and the Joshua Bell experiment, the same, and very legitimate, excuse was voiced: “But we’re busy”, “we have to work”, “we don’t have time to stop and analyze everything”.  That’s true, and also why it’s becoming increasingly valuable to find ways to scale work and social media efforts.  

However, perhaps this need not be an all or nothing type deal.  We don’t need to busily skim over everything or stop in our tracks for hours to analyze something.  As we aim to process information and experiences efficiently, are there any strategies to help us process them meaningfully as well?

Prioritize what is important to you

(comment from Jay Baer’s blog post)

With more information there are way more distractions.  So one idea is to take some time each week, or perhaps even each day, to reflect on what is really important both at work and in life.  With a list of goals and priorities in mind, it will be a lot easier to avoid the distractions of the day and take note of what is important.

Stay Mindful in Your Routine

Most of the people in the subway the day Joshua Bell was playing were doing the same thing they had done countless times over: got up and dressed at 8am, took the subway to work, passed by the street performers, etc etc.  And when you do the same thing every day, it’s very easy for your mind to follow your actions into auto-pilot mode.  It’s a much easier piece of advice to talk about then to actually do, but keeping mentally engaged in what you do will not only help you enjoy it more and learn faster, but also notice the nuances of the experience.  

What other strategies do you use to process experiences meaningfully as well as efficiently?