How To Find Friends and Colleagues on Twitter

Twitter can help you find friends and colleagues to follow by importing your contacts from your email address book. 

• With your permission and a few easy steps, we can check your email address book to see which of your contacts are already using Twitter!
• You can then choose to follow them if you want to get their Tweets.

To import an address book:

1. Click on Find friends on the Discover page. (Fig. 1, below)
2. Several email providers are listed (Gmail, Yahoo, Aol, and Hotmail & Messenger), click the Search Contacts button next to your preferred email provider. (Fig. 2, below)
3. A new window will pop-up, prompting you to enter your log in credentials for your email account. (Please make sure your browser enables pop ups!) If you are already logged in to your email account, proceed to the next step. 
4. When asked if you agree to share your information with Twitter, click 'Agree' or 'Allow' access. (Fig. 3, below)
5. A list of your friends and colleagues who are already on Twitter will populate on the page. You can choose to follow all of them by selecting the 'Follow all' button on the upper right hand side of the results, or if you'd like to see updates only from specific people, you can choose to follow your email contacts individually clicking the 'Follow' button under their account.
   Please note: if you click "Follow all", you can still manually unfollow people on this screen or at any time in the future.
6. If you have contacts that do not have Twitter accounts, you can click “Invite x number to join Twitter” at the top of page. Don't worry, we won't send an email automatically, and you can select who to invite from a list that will appear after you click "Invite". You can also click “Try Another Service” to import additional contacts from a different account.
   
7. Once you've followed your friends and colleagues, you're done! You can navigate back to your home page Tweets timeline to view Tweets from the accounts you just followed.
   

Fig. 1: Click 'Find friends' on the Discover page.

Fig. 2: Click 'Search contacts' for preferred email account (in this case, a Yahoo account).

Fig. 3: Click 'Agree' to allow access to your address book.

To remove contact info from Twitter after importing:

You can remove imported contact info from Twitter at any time. (Note that your Who to follow recommendations may not be as relavant after removing this info.)

1. Click on Find Friends on the Discover page
2. Under the email provider list is a block of text. In that text there is a link to 'remove' your contacts. (Highlighted in Fig. 4, below)
3. Click that link, you will be prompted to confirm that you'd like to remove your contacts.
4. Viola! Your contact info has been removed.

Fig. 4: Remove your contacts

Having Trouble?

Check out our Search Troubleshooting section for solutions to common problems.