Over the last year or so, Twitter has grown exponentially and has become the third largest social networking site. It’s grown from a cute little blue bird to the kind of feathered monstrosity that people haven’t feared since that giant yellow thing on Sesame Street.
I don’t care who you are, Big Bird was creepy.
Today, Twitter is now widely accepted as one of the greatest free marketing tools – It’s word-of-mouth in a pure electronic form. For many regional and global businesses that function both in an online and offline presence, Twitter is great for building a brand and reaching both new and existing customers. It allows businesses to seek feedback, keep in touch with associates and outsourced workers, it fosters team building, offer discounts and value on promotional products and services – The list goes on. The question is, what good is to a local business?
I’ve had people ask me on more than one occasion whether or not Twitter would help their local business. We’re talking businesses limited to a very local area, not an entire region. More specifically, businesses that have zero online product. An example of this would be a construction company. For a local business like this, it doesn’t do much good to utilize an auto follow for market specific keywords. You’d end up with followers spanning the continental US – pointless when you’re trying to brand yourself locally and interact with the few local users you might find.
But let’s take business out of the picture for a moment and consider it from a personal standpoint. There is real value in finding local Twitter users to connect with. This tactic is great for networking, but also for getting relevant, real-time, local information about things like jobs, news, politics, weather, food, and more. It’s not likely that someone from Oregon can help you find a good place to eat in New York. Weather reports from Alaska aren’t very enlightening.
So let’s look at some of the easiest ways to locate local Twitter users – whether it’s personal or business.
What some people don’t know is that Twitter has its own little search engine that looks remarkably like Google on the front end, and it’s a great way to sit down and find people – especially locals.
The best way to target and find local users it use the following query:
Near:<cityname> within:25mi
When you perform he search it will kick back the most recent tweets that are geocoding for your targeted search area. From there, you can begin looking through profiles to also find other local Twitter users and quickly build your following. This one is a little bit of leg work but within the span of week you could potentially add hundreds of new followers.
Twellowhood
TwellowHood is a local directory of Twitter users from the site Twellow. This acts as a yellowpages for Twitter, allowing you to search local users by selected topics or their listed names. The greatest feature is that it lets you knuckle into your local area and Twitter users around you. The ease of use makes it extremely appealing. All you need to do is click on the map to zoom into your area then start browsing local users.
iPhone Apps
You can find a number of applications on the iPhone relating to Twitter. Some of them actually come bundled with features to help locate twitter users that are local to you. Most of the apps function the same and do searches based on your exact location as determined by the geo-specific location feature of your iPhone. Some of the most common are
Nearby Tweets
Nearby Tweets is a rehashed, glammed up version of the Twitter search engine. The setup can automatically determine your location and will load a list of recent users within a specified radius. You’re able to customize the search by altering the location, radius and keywords. Thanks to the interface, the results are a lot more visually satisfying than the Twitter search engine
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Joerg Weishaupt is a 48 year old entrepreneur, software architect, search engine optimization and social media expert. Joerg has been building a lot of profitable Internet businesses since he put his first website online in 1995. He is also one of the founders and partners of Social Media Science LLC, where he launched a content syndication network called SYNND.
Joerg resides in a small, quiet community about 100 miles outside of Munich, Germany. If you ever seek to find him, look for where the cows gather.
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