If you’re like me and want to follow the local conversations (Atlantic Canada) on twitter, then this post is for you. These resources will help you find out the local buzz and help you find new and interesting people on twitter in your area to follow.

Giles Crouch from mediabadger posted a tweet yesterday saying that social media usage had increased in the past year in Atlantic Canada.

I’m hoping he will share the results via his blog as I’m absolutely sure there has been an increase and I think we can attribute a great deal of that to twitter (and facebook). Twitter acts as a central hub for all the connections. Sharing and distributing information.

follow Giles Crouch (@webconomist) on Twitter

Note: If you have no idea what Twitter is or how to use it, this post may be confusing. I suggest you check out Twitter in plain english first.

NB Tweeters

We’re very excited to announce that Third Tuesday NB is in the midst of creating a page off the TTNB site (not available yet), that will display all NB tweeters. To get this list started, we’d like you fill out the form info if you live in NB and are on twitter. This will help us be in creating a NB Twitter community. If you need to edit your entry, you can view the NB Twitter list.

Once the list is compiled we will place it off the Third TuesdayNB site.

A big thanks to Andrew Foster and Dan Martell for heading this up.

follow Andrew Foster (@afoster) on Twitter

follow Dan Martell (@danmartell) on Twitter

follow Third Tuesday NB (@thirdtuesdaynb) on Twitter

In the meantime, here are some resources for you to reach out and tweet someone in your area.

Twitter Local

Twitter local has a great feature that will show you tweets and top tweeters (ranked only based on # tweets in the past 24 hrs) that are city keyword area related within a specific mile radius of your city.

Just plugging in a couple here for viewing, but you can fill out your area and specifics.

Fredericton (20 mile radius)

Saint John (20 mile radius)

Moncton (20 mile radius)

Twellow

Twellow lets you search by area or topic and gives you a list of tweeters with summaries about who they are, how many they follow and what types of topics they tweet about. Some locations to get you started.

Fredericton

Saint John

Moncton

Twitter Search

If you haven’t used twitter search yet and realized the benefits of subscribing to the RSS feed for a search term, now’s your chance. These searches pull every tweet that has these keywords in it.

Atlantic Canada

Maritimes

Fredericton

Saint John

Moncton

Miramichi

Nova Scotia

Halifax

Prince Edward Island

Charlottetown

Various metrics for “evaluating” yourself/followers in twitter.

I think these are subjective for the most part as there isn’t a set standard for how rankings are created, nor do I think that it necessarily means that a high rank equals high quality tweets. Many of them are based off how often you retweet, outbound links, profile views, follower/followers ratios and so on.

Twitter Grader - Ranks tweeters and suggests others to follow. Shows rankings for area, ie. Fredericton is defaulted in the link.

Twinfluence - Breaks down your Reach, Velocity and Social Capital.

Follow Cost - how often do they tweet, too frequently? Not enough?

Qwitter - find out when someone stops following you. Lets you know the post you just posted prior to them leaving. Note: this is often a way to find out that in fact you weren’t following them and they’re just cleaning up their list because you weren’t following them. It’s not necessarily a result of your tweet.

Twitter Stats - not for evaluating, but a useful tool. If you’re curious about how many tweets you post in a day or per hour. Or who do you reply/tweet to the most. I tend to tweet more in the mornings and evenings.

Resources

There are literally hundreds of more twitter apps/features available. The above links are just a selection that help you zone in geographically. For more:

Mashable’s TwitterMania 140+ More Twitter Tools

Mashable’s How to Build Community on Twitter

Guy Kawasaki’s Looking for Mr. Goodtweet: How to pick up followers on Twitter

O’Reilly’s webinar on Twitter for Business

follow me (@WalkingGal) on Twitter