Stephanie’s building a nice following and exchanging ideas with others in the world of staffing and HR – a field that relies heavily on networking and contacts. And she’s doing it without spending hours a week on Twitter. The plan she follows is simple.

She tries to tweet something useful once a day, or at least several times a week. She’s mostly posting links to articles that will appeal to others in her field, as well as potential clients. She favors a mix of HR and staffing industry articles and general-interest stories about the job market.

She chooses her followers carefully. She used keyword searches for terms like “hiring” and “HR” to find people who talk about her favorite topics. She talks to them and retweets the ones with the best posts. In a few weeks, she built a core following of smart people with ideas relevant to her business. She recently used it to drum up excitement about her new column in the Denver Business Journal.

Stephanie also likes to include some personal tweets on her feed. Twitter-haters often complain that the service boils down to a bunch of people blabbing about what they ate for lunch, but a few well-chosen and substantive items help remind followers that you’re a real person. Stephanie tweeted about her vacation and a visit to the Colorado Human Resource Association annual meeting to balance her more serious items about hiring strategies and unemployment statistics.

Sometimes clients tell me that Twitter isn’t their thing – that they don’t understand how it works, or they find it intimidating. The ones who finally give it a shot tend to quickly find new people they haven’t met before, and interact in new ways with people they have met. It’s another way to put your name and the name of your business out there.