Finding Tweighbors on Twitter

You’ve arrived! You’re on Twitter, you’re tweeting, but are you strategically growing your network? And I’m not talking about following all of someone else’s followers. It’s definitely valuable to learn from your peers, but following every other agent in the Twitosphere is not necessarily going to help you build relationships and grow your network within your own market area.

There are some great techniques and tools, however, which you can employ to get to know the twits in your neck of the woods. And once you find and follow these local twits, it’s your job to befriend them with your interest based experiences, professional expertise (transparently), and above all…being helpful. Be a friendly conversationalist, gradually gaining trust and building relationships…that may lead to offline connecting and potential sales leads when the time is right.

Here are a few tips for using local search strategies on Twitter:

Twellow Hood – Find and follow others based on your geographic location (tweighbors). Enter your location and you can view a list of Twits in your area to follow. TwellowHood also provides you with an extended bio of 2000 characters.

TwitterLocal- Search a specific location and/or the surrounding area. View and follow local twits or obtain the RSS feeds for an area.

Twitter Search – You can search for clients you already know by name and follow them. Enter a specific city name or neighborhood and view who’s talking about your market.

A couple of advanced tips for you:

Yahoo Pipes: Take the RSS feeds from several locations you’ve searched and mash them up into one feed. Then you can scan your reader quickly for new Twits or start conversations with locals you didn’t already know.

Tweetdeck- Download it and create groups based on locations or keywords. With Tweetdeck you can display several groups at once. For example, (1) all tweets, (2) local tweets/list of friends, (3) a specific location/city, (4) RE topic like relocation.