You can use Twitter to find potential local customers and increase the visibility of your business in your community.

• Before You Start: You have a business Twitter account.  You know how to follow people and how to use Twitter’s communication features.
• Learning Level: 3 | Building Skills
• Article Last Updated: Sunday, October 8, 2011

Finding Local Customers

One of the great things about social media tools is that they open up the whole world to join in the conversation. That’s great if your business works with people at remote locations. However, if your business relies on people walking in the door, how can you use social media to find local customers?

Twitter is a powerful tool for reaching new customers because Twitter allows you to build relationships with strangers. There are ways that you can focus your community building on people in your geography, people who live and work near your business, or drive past it on their daily commute.

Here are five tools that allow you to locate Twitter users based on their geography.

• Twitter Advanced Search includes a place search option. Enter a location and Twitter finds it on Google Maps, and then finds the Twitter users located within a specific distance. The results appear as a tweet stream rather than as a list of users, so check back at different times to find different people. This is a great place to start your local Twitter user search.
• Twitter Grader is a service that evaluates Twitter user effectiveness. However, it also uses the account location to create a list of the Twitter Elite, the best Twitter users in each city of the country. If you live in a large metropolitan area, there is no way to narrow down the results to your specific neighborhood, but you can use suburb names. One advantage to this tool is that you find people who have a large Twitter following and can help you reach a larger audience.
• Nearby Tweets allows you to enter an address and displays a stream of current tweets from people at that location.  Each time you use this tool, you may find different users.
• TweepSearch allows you to search through Twitter user profiles. You must be creative and diligent because you must try alternative variations (like spelling out the state, using the state abbreviation, and omitting the state).  TweetSearch checks through the entire profile, not just the location. And because it depends on what people provide, you need to verify the results a bit. April 2011: TweepSearch is no longer available.
• Twellow is a Twitter user directory with a local search feature that allows you to search through the directory listings for your location information.
• ChirpCity uses a drop-down list to identify your state and city by name. You can set a distance from the city in kilometers along the left column.

These tools (and many others) allow you to start finding people on Twitter based on their location. As you find people, review their tweet stream to see if they are part of your target audience before you follow them. A little bit of research now can save you from wasting time following people who are not likely to become part of your business community.

Your turn: Have you found local people to follow on Twitter? What tools did you use, and what was your strategy? Share your stories here!

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