Who do you follow on Twitter?

[fraserhannah]

I am just getting to grips with Twitter, suppose its better later than never, and was wondering who everyone follows for SEO and Web Design. Personal i find it hard to keep up with more than five or six people with out getting information overload, and have no time for those that tweet twenty or thirty times a day about what they had for lunch or who they are meeting for drinks.

If you had to pick the top five people to follow for SEO and the top five for Web Design who would you chose?

I work on the SEO side of our business and i think my top five would be, in no particular order:

Randfish
bill_slawski
mattcutts
aaronwall
dannysullivan

Would be interested what others think especially on the web design side as we tend to follow people we know locally.

Thanks

Fraser

[Darroch]

One suggestion for who to follow is to listen to the people that SEOMoz trusted for the recent Search Engine Ranking Factors 2011. I've compiled the list of contributors into an easy to follow twitter list: http://twitter.com/#!/darrochreid/seo-insights

As you don't care about their eating habits, I also created a filtered version of SEO/Search related updates. This updates each day, so should be more practical: http://paper.li/darrochreid/1308375741

For Web Design I'd follow the following 5 folk:

@smashingmag
@alistapart
@zeldman @Malarkey
@paul_irish

Enjoy

Darroch

[fraserhannah]

Thanks Alan, I have added your suggestions to my twitter list.

[KeriMorgret]

It's that place that doesn't give you Mozpoints for participation and makes you write in 140 characters.

[EGOL]

What's twitter? 

[AlanBleiweiss]

I don't use ping.fm - I'm talking purely for maintaining a twitter stream.  I'm a power tweeter.  Or more aptly, addict.  Twitter is the single most important resource I have for staying on top of cutting edge industry trends, topics and debates.  And it's how I maintain my own voice being heard above the chatter.

I have a column in TweetDeck set up where I have assigned the most important "pay attention to" people out of all the people I follow.  That way their tweets don't get lost in the mix.  And from time to time, I scan the longer "everyone" column.

[oznappies]

Our competitors, good to know what the chatter is about.

[dignan99]

HI Alan,

I'd love to know your setup in regards to using Hootsuite and Tweetdeck.

I put together a system to work with my block, where Hootsuite posted to certain areas in Ping.fm, but I am unsure if it was as streamlined as it should or could have been.

[AlanBleiweiss]

Fraser,

The first thing I recommend is getting Tweetdeck (which I use) or HootSuite to better manage your participation and reading.  Saved my sanity.

There are many great people to follow.  You've got a great start, and dignan99's additions are also top notch.

@TheGypsy is killer when it comes to technical SEO

@StevePlunkett is one to pay attention to regarding deep info

@WilReynolds tweets great industry links

@rustybrick is always coming out with industry news and happenings

@kim_cre8pc is a must-watch for user experience related stuff vital to SEO

@Kikolani is a fount of information related to blogging, which is a big part of SEO

I could go on and on.  Since you're needing to take it slow, start with these.  Then when you're ready for more, let me know.  I'd be happy to provide many more.

[dignan99]

For local SEO I believe David Mihm, Mike Blumenthal, and Andrew Shotland are some reasonable ones to follow.