How to Find People on Twitter by Email

So here you are. You've launched your Twitter account and your follower number is a big bold zero. You wonder how you might get more followers quickly.

Who better to recruit than people you already know? You surely have a big long list of people who love you and would be excited to learn of your new presence on their favorite social network.

Luckily for you, there are plenty of legitimate ways to find people on Twitter by email, whether personal or business emails. There are also plenty of opportunities to find them by Twitter Search as a solid backup strategy.

Twitter has put together a fairly simple set of instructions for adding people through emails that are in your address book:

1. Go to the Discover page and click on Find friends.
2. Select Search Contacts next to your email provider (Gmail, Yahoo, etc.).
3. Enter your email login credentials when prompted. (Please make sure your browser enables pop-ups!)
4. When asked if you agree to share your information with Twitter, click Agree or Allow access.
5. Contacts who are already on Twitter will be shown. Follow individuals by clicking Follow, or follow all contacts by clicking Follow all.
6. You can invite contacts to join Twitter from this page as well. You don't receive an email automatically; you select whom to invite from a list that appears after you click Invite.

Twitter also allows you to invite friends via email on your find friends page. This particular function is especially unhelpful if you're trying to find a certain person on Twitter, because in an ideal universe if you entered the email address of someone already on Twitter, they'd say "This person is already on Twitter." But they don't. Instead, they just let you know that they invited the person to Twitter. So basically, don't count on this to find people on Twitter via email.

You can, however, search for people by name in the main search box on the site and via the Discover tab. Depending on their name, it could be an easy process or a difficult one, but it's better than nothing.

In case you are wondering, you can't look up emails individually. They need to be in your address book. Simple solution: add them to your address book.

You also can't use Twitter Search to look up the email of someone you're looking for. It doesn't have any fields dedicated to email, although their Advanced Search has many more specific search functions.

Some other housekeeping notes having to do with Twitter and email:

• Twitter will not let you create a new account using an email address that is already in use. So basically, if you want to create five different Twitter accounts, you better have five unique email addresses.

• If you want to change your email address, log in, go to your Account page, and replace your current email address with your new email address. Twitter will ask you for your Twitter password in order to confirm your request. Twitter will then email you at the new email and ask you to click a link and confirm that email address.

• If you're getting too much email, you can update your email preferences. As Twitter adds new email newsletters, they automatically add you to their lists. If you haven't logged into your email preferences lately, you'll find a long list of email newsletters that you've been subscribed to. To unsubscribe from Twitter emails, click the gear icon on the top right-hand corner of your screen while logged into Twitter. Select Settings, then email notifications. Review the list to subscribe or unsubscribe to whatever notifications please or displease you.

• If you get an email from Twitter that looks suspicious, forward it to spoof@twitter.com. Emails that look fishy, possibly asking you for your login information, are called phishing emails.