How do you decide who to follow on Twitter?

[mijustin]

Do you use Twitter's "Who to follow" recommendations?

Do you see who your friends are following?

Do you only follow people you've met in person?

What are the deciding factors?

[epc]

I follow people I know personally, services and businesses I use regularly, and people I’ve met and have some sort of ongoing connection to (but aren’t “friends” or acquaintances). Everything else gets added to a list, and especially noisy twitterers (not a fixed rule, but if you update > dozen times an hour) get added to a list and unfollowed.

I find accounts by very occasionally strolling through my followers and the followers/followees of people I follow, or through blogs/articles I like, or people who interact with me who are not bots.

I've set a soft limit of 200 for myself for accounts to follow, it once was over 1000 but I just found that useless in all twitter clients. I unfollowed almost all celebrities, almost all bloggers I regularly read anyway, and really tried hard to cut it down to people or services I had some sort of connection to.

Though I understand the reasoning, the inability to match email accounts to twitter ids is annoying as I frequently discover that someone I know is on twitter entirely by accident.

[boopsie]

Follow people who are interesting and useful -- ideally both.

Look at your competitors, friends, business colleagues to see who they are following. Look at what they say. See if you care.

Sometimes someone "matters" to your business even if they aren't especially interesting because of their position. It might help to know that a prospective customer is in town, so you can tweet, "Want to meet for lunch?"

Think of Twitter as a radio. You can tune in and listen to whatever station interests you.

(Note: I co-wrote a book about Twitter for business. That might make me more reliable... or less. :-) )

[KoryFerbet]

I focus on people that I want to interact with, not just see what they're doing. I use a combination of people I meet, companies that I use their services, people that my followees retweet or reply to, blogs/writers.

I tend to keep my number small (130 currently) and regularly go through and remove people that I no longer want to interact with. I don't really see a point in following 1k+ people as it's difficult to get a true understanding of what/who they are.

[michaelbuddy]

I follow the creators of my favorite FOSS free software and plugins, a couple other popular tech people in the subcultures. Local popular twitter tech people, friends, a few peole in hobbies I like and some randoms here and there from books and articles I've read. I'm most happy with following services that I partake in as that makes me feel like I can re-broadcast their stuff and also find out early what's upcoming news.