When you start out on Twitter, you usually start following the people you already know from your outside-of-Twitter-life. It may be from TV (celebrities), friends, networking contacts or family. Well, Twitter is a great way to connect with people who you could start building a relationship with. If your business works with local consumers or companies, than where your contacts live – might be important to you.

If your potential customers are people interested in a specific thing (i.e. wine for a wineshop), than connecting with people who share that passion is a great step forward in building a relationship with your potential target market.

There are a couple of websites where you can find people based on location, business or interest.

1. http://twellow.com – Directory of Twitter users, with a multitude of options to find people you could connect with. For example on geographic area, keyword search.

2. http://twitr.org – Another directory, not as extensive as Twellow, but you can find people based on the most popular tags.

3. http://geofollow.com/ – Geographic directory of Twitter users. Look for city, state or country combined with keywords.

4. http://twtbiz.com/ – Find entrepreneurs, businesses, investors and media peeps on Twitter based on a keyword search.

5. http://justtweetit.com/ – Easy overview on the homepage of categories from which you can find people that share your interest.

6. http://listorious.com/ – Last but not least. The new way of searching great people on Twitter, is by checking out the lists that people create of interested Twitter users. Now everyone can make their own fave directories, ro what they are now called Listst. And Listorious is a directory of lists on Twitter – to find great people recommended by others that fit your keyword or geographic search.

Finding people is the first step. But don’t forget to listen to their conversations, and join in when you have something valuable to share. That’s how conversations start and it is the beginning of a real conversation starting to take place.