How to get local Twitter followers fast

With hundreds of millions of tweets being sent each day, Twitter is a force that cannot be ignored by any responsible business owner; in fact, this is the main reason why close to 50% of the American entrepreneurs have a Twitter account. In addition to this, Alexa ranks Twitter as being the 9th most trafficked website in the entire world, placing it very close to Wikipedia and Microsoft’s Windows Live search engine when it comes to the number of visitors that access it on a daily basis.

The recipe for success includes following a good number of people each day, knowing that some of them (usually in the 10…40% range) will follow you back, and thus will increase your number of followers. But how can you make sure that you are following the right people and not a bunch of overseas tweeps (Twitter peeps) or even worse, several Twitter bots that don’t have anything to do with you, your company or your offer?

The first method makes use of Twitter’s own search function, which can be found by pointing your browser to http://search.twitter.com; it might have a simple interface, but this web application allows us to use several complex search operators. Type in the search box something like “near:TargetedCity within:DistanceInMiles” (without using the quotes) and you will get a list of people that are located within the specified distance near the targeted city – here’s an example.

This search operator will bring in a list of people who have put the city you’re interested in as their location in the Twitter profile. If the results that you have gotten aren’t exactly what you are looking for, feel free to click the “Refine results” button in order to bring on Twitter’s advanced search window.

So now you’ve got a good sized list of people that are located in the city you’re interested in – what do you do with it? First of all, examine their profiles, looking for tweeps that have an active presence and a decent number of followers, and then follow them – some will follow back. And as a general rule, try to stay away from people who don’t take the time to use a picture for their profile; they will not be of too much help.

Time to move on to the second method: Twitter’s hashtags (#). The tweeps use # to tag certain keywords, and this includes city names as well; this means that if we use Twitter’s search function again, this time looking for something like “#hartford” (without using the quotes) we will get another list of targeted tweeps, even if they didn’t fill in their profile data using the proper city location, etc.

Make sure to experiment with hashtags; the people that you are targeting might use a very specific tag to name the city or neighborhood they live in, or even a hashtag they’ve invented. As soon as you’ve discovered the proper tags, start checking the tweeps one by one, following the ones that are active on Twitter.

The third (and last) method I’m going to talk about is the usage of Twitter directories, websites that usually list the names, profile descriptions and number of followers for many of the Twitter users. Just google “twitter directory” (keep the quotes to filter the noise this time) and you’ll discover hundreds and hundreds of websites that group the followers depending on their location, no matter if we are talking about countries, cities or neighborhoods. If you live in the U.S.A. try to use Twellow and Twocals, two Twitter directories that have data for several millions of American citizens in their databases.

Bonus ninja tactic: find one (or several) of your main competitors on Twitter, and then click their “followers” button to reveal the entire list. Go through their followers list, following all the people that match your criteria, and thus get access to a highly targeted number of local tweeps without doing too much work.

If you like this article, make sure to follow me on Twitter; I don’t post spam or nasty links, so you’ll be safe with me.

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