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.

Host an event (live or virtual) and publicize it. Create a Twitter hash tag for the event (something like #greatevent that people can include in all of their tweets about the event before, during and afterward). Publicize the event through all the channels you use to communicate with your leads and clients, include the hash tag and ask everyone to use it when they tweet about your event. You can set up a Twitter search for your #greatevent hash tag and watch the tweets roll in.

This will help you identify a core group of loyal followers. By tweeting about your event to their network of followers, they help you expand the reach of your event. And some people from this extended network will be interested enough to start following you on Twitter.

Voila! You’re further along the path toward building a robust Twitter following after just one event and a little publicity. (Don’t forget to monitor the chatter, respond and retweet when appropriate, and thank new followers for their interest to keep the momentum going.)