Many people who use Twitter brag about their huge number of followers.  Some have tens of thousands, in fact, and follow thousands in return.  Depending upon your purpose, however, high follower numbers may be meaningless.  It’s the quality of followers that counts.

If your purpose is to learn and share as much as you can about green living, for instance, you’ll want to follow those who share information about this subject, and build a list of followers interested in living green.  Those trying to sell you a Bubblewash (or most anything else) probably won’t help you achieve your purpose and you may not want to clutter up your newsfeed by following them.

Here are five tips to help you maximally learn, share, and influence with Twitter:

1. Focus on one subject or several related subjects.  Don’t try to be everything to all people.
2. Provide value by posting substantive thoughts and links on your chosen subject matter, particularly during the times your key audience is on line
3. Put key words in your tweets and your bio to attract like minds; and follow those interested in your subject by doing your own key word search regularly
4. Retweet (RT) posts on your subject matter and repay those who RT you with a thank you or, better yet, by RTing them — if you want to be RTed, remember to keep your tweets to under 110 characters.
5. Build your own targeted newsfeed and ”tribe” by following those who tweet about or are interested in your subject matter.  Before hitting follow, check out their bio and last few tweets to see if you have a common interest.

To see an example, check me out at www.twitter.com/Bright_Builder. And feel free to follow me if we share similar interests:-).