Finding your agency’s best prospective client online audience is not yet an exact science. But for now you can be in the right ballpark. The same is true regarding Twitter. There are plenty of search applications out there but all have their limitations. The following five sites have been the most helpful to me in locating prospective client “tweeps” to follow.
1. Twitter Search – Twitter’s built in people search is the easiest place to start but isn’t necessarily the best way to find people on Twitter. Twitter Search is much better, especially using their advanced search page. Be sure and check out their search operations pages for some handy examples for your search query.
2. Twellow – is an excellent search tool for prospective clients. With over 6.2 million Twitter user profiles now indexed in Twellow and placed into a huge number of categories. You can search the entire lot of profiles, or confine searches to a single category. Twellow also operates a local directory called the “Twellowhood.”
3. Tweepz – Allows you limit searches to specific parts of Twitter’s user information (such as name, bio, and location). Through the advance search filter results by follower/following numbers, location, and other extracted terms, enhances your search results.
4. Twitterel – you can search for prospective clients to follow by doing keyword searches of tweets. This service can update you by email, direct message, or @reply when it finds new people it thinks you might be interested in following. It’s similar to Google Alerts.
5. WeFollow – is a Twitter user directory that organizes people by hashtags. WeFollow is user-generated and anyone can add themselves by tweeting @wefollow with three #hashtags that describe them. For example there are 723 Twitter users that are subscribed to #adagencynewbiz.
If you have helpful search sites/directories that have been helpful to you please share them in the comment section below.
Very helpful Michael, thank you. Unfortunately, nothing to add at this point, being a newbie, but will be back.
As always, you’re a huge help. Love your stuff.
Mak, thanks. That makes the effort worth it.
Good info thank you. I am developing my twitter presence right now. Twitter really does seem to be the best social networking for business. Its working for me in the auto sales industry for sure.
Steve, you are very welcome and thanks for sharing.
Thanks so much for this informative post. We are developing an app via Twitter’s API so we can do Keyword or Hashtag searches for a client and this would also be useful to agencies as well.
Of course, knowing your ideal client, is an essential. As a design studio we’ve struggled with that a bit.