I’ve been on twitter since sometime in 2008 (I assume, this is as far back as twitter is showing me).
In that time, I’ve added a ton of followers, and constantly sorting through the requests I’ve received. I don’t follow everyone. Particularly “Gurus” with thousands of following/followers. I don’t follow people who primarily use Twitterfeed so it’s just a stream of RSS posts. I don’t follow spammers (naturally) or people that do nothing except hock their site, their product(s) or their friend(s) similar products, and I especially do not follow self-claimed gurus, be it social media, seo, sem, etc.
The people I follow on twitter fall into a few categories:
- I know them personally.
- I know them professionally.
- They are an understood expert in their field(s) like:
- Web Development (Particularly Javascript Framework Developers)
- SEO
- SEM
- Analytics
- Social Media
Particular niches I subscribe to, and I have developed a small list of experts that I’d trust what they say (and occasionally toss questions to them). I consider this list to be “obvious” experts – they’ve proven themselves professionally, or have written at length in blogs about the topic.
My Obvious SEO Experts on Twitter
- Matt Cutts (from Google)
- Rand Fishkin (from SEO Moz)
- Aaron Wall (from SEOBook)
- SearchEngineLand (from itself)
- Jennifer Laycock (from Search Engine Guide)
- Mark Scholl (from EnginePoint Marketing)
I’ve limited the list to six – because I feel they cover a breadth of knowledge that you could gain, mainly from their blog postings – sometimes, 140 characters isn’t enough (some times it is).
I’ll work out additional “Obvious Twitter People to follow” in the future.
