The biggest secret on twitter is the search bar at the top of the platform. Rarely used, but it holds so much potential that it’s only a matter of time until it becomes so exploited that twitter no longer exists. In this post, I’m going to demonstrate how bricks & mortar businesses can use twitter to search out people in their area making twitter a valuable FREE lead generation service.
Lets consider a hair salon or barbers in Nottingham looking to find new customers. Using the twitter search bar, very much like when websites do keyword research, we’re trying to find key terms people would mention on twitter that is relevant to the services our Salon or Barbers is offering.
The most obvious phrase would be “need hair cut”, if we type it into the search bar (without the quote marks) it will search for all mentions of those three words in any order in a sentence. In this example it seems to be a pretty good search with most results being relevant but a sentence such as “I need to go to the shop for a hair brush but I just cut my finger. Ouch!” would also find its way into the results.
So, we have some results but these people could be from anywhere in the world. If we add onto the end of our search near:[LOCATION] which in this example will look like:
need hair cut near:Nottingham
This will filter out everyone apart from people with their location set to Nottingham, but remember this will also filter out people who have the location set to something random like ‘LaLa Land’.
As we can see from this particular search, our first result brings up a tweet from an hour ago. The next set would be to either strike up a conversation with this person along with the rest of the people in our results with the aim of convincing them to visit our Salon/Barber shop which could include a new customer discount, I’ll leave that part up to you.
If you’re interested in finding more ways to use social media for your business, get in touch.
