You know the old saying, “if a Twitterer Tweets in the Fauxlower Forest and no one is there to listen (only to talk), does that make for social networking?” Okay, that’s not exactly how it goes.

The point is that there’s not much point tweeting if nobody’s listening. So how do you go about finding people who are listening? In particular, how do you find influential people who’ll listen to you and (if you’re lucky) spread your message?

Two part question — two part answer.

To find people who are listening

…look for people who a) don’t follow so many people that they can’t possibly listen to them, and b) post a healthy number of @replies and “RTs” (retweets). Makes sense, right? When looking for @repliers, don’t be fooled by @messagers (people who’re just trying to get attention by posting tweets containing others’ @usernames, but aren’t actually engaged in conversation).

To find influential people

…look for those who’re followed by a lot more people than they follow. With the possible exception of some who built up their follower count by following a ton of people, and then unfollowed them, these people built up their follower counts by being important and/or interesting. People follow them either to hear what they have to say, or hoping to get a reciprocal follow from someone they consider important.

Naturally, I wouldn’t be blogging about this if I didn’t have a way to find these people. Check out this screenshot from my Fauxlowers profile:

This table lists my followers who have the best follower/following ratios. If you’re in my market, many of these people might be worth following, because their ratios suggest that they’re attracting followers naturally.

Even among those in my “fauxlowers” column, there may be some who you can successfully engage in conversation on Twitter. They are following more people than I think most mere mortals can really follow, but in some cases, that’s because they’re not mere mortals :-). Or at least they’re much more committed to Twitter than your average person (I’d say that’s true at least of Michel Fortin).

So to find people to follow and engage via Twitter, check out the Best Followers and Fauxlowers lists of people in your niche. Click through to their Twitter profiles, check out their websites and scan their tweets, and decide if they’re people you want to follow.

Note that links shown in bold will take you to a Fauxlowers.com profile (you can click through to their Twitter profile from there). I’m only generating these tables for Fauxlowers.com members, so you can’t find them for everyone. Fortunately, Followers.com is growing faster all the time.

I’ve got one more way to use your Best Followers and Fauxlowers table, but I’ll save that for another post.