Twitter for Business: How to Geo Target Twitter for Small Business Local Social Media #smallbusiness

Geo-targeted twitter
Click Image to read why we need Geographically Targeted Group Blogs

Small businesses and bloggers are missing enormous opportunities that can be easily accessed by creating geographically targeted Twitter accounts and blog content.

By adding a local component to your social media accounts and blog, or creating accounts specifically to reach a location based audience, your Twitter account becomes far more valuable – for you and others.

Any business that operates in a limited geographic area will want to implement these tips as will all bloggers – whether you think this applies to what you are doing or not. Read on to find out WHY your geolocation is your strongest niche.

Small businesses probably already realize that a Twitter account with followers scattered around the world is unlikely to increase their local leads or sales. They will understand why the people they most want to reach are their neighbors who could be interested in their products or services.

Small Businesses Need to Reach Local Audiences –
Bloggers Who Have Local Influence Are Invaluable
Because when you can reach a local market
It makes sense for businesses to buy advertising
on your blog or pay you for blog outreach services.

Bloggers frequently tell me they do not want to “limit” their audience to a specific location and I spend a lot of time explaining to them why adding geo-targeted information to their blog positions them where the money is and will get them more recommendations.

Blogs and Twitter accounts providing LOCAL information that
shares content specifically beneficial to people in your location
makes others want to share it with others
BECAUSE IT IS UNIQUE and provides value.

Adding a local component to your existing blogs or Twitter accounts OR creating a Twitter account or blog specifically for a particular geographic location is not difficult.

WHY GEO-TARGET YOUR TWEETS?

Are you a tiny fish lost in a HUGE ocean?
Are you a tiny fish lost in a HUGE ocean?

When you are a tiny fish
in an enormous ocean
of 1000s or 1os of 1000s

of Blogs in your niche –

WHY should anyone recommend you?

Big fish small pond
Be one of the Biggest fish in your LOCAL pond

 

Decide to become a HUGE fish in your Local Small Pond and provide content on your blog and on Twitter that is interesting and useful to that local audience you give them an excellent reason to share what you are doing with others.

Go out of your way to create content of local interest and connect with people interested in what is happening locally.

You become a more effective influencer
With a much more targeted audience.

HOW TO TWITTER LOCALLY:

  1. Claim a Twitter username that includes your location. Consider common abbreviations and local nicknames. You must use a different email address for each Twitter account. You can get a free email address from mail.yahoo.com and many other sites.
  2. Add an Avatar image related to your location and write a bio specifically about that city, metro, state or country.
  3. Create a blog page about your new location and link to it from your Twitter account and make sure your Twitter username is easy to locate on that page and on your blog or site.
  4. Follow Twitter users in your desired location (see tools below for how to find them).
  5. Find interesting content about what’s happening, live events, local entertainment, or even the local news and weather and use Twitterfeed or something similar to feed useful information to your local followers.
  6. Manually share additional tweets of interest locally.
  7. Interact with others in your target location.

Join experienced bloggers with social media influence
on JustRetweet.com ~ Read about how we support other
bloggers and small business with Twitter retweets.

DoFollow CommentLuv Bloggers Add Your Blogs Here
to be considered by our special projects and private forum.

Small Businesses AND bloggers should also read
CommentLuv Your Way to Business Prosperity

HOW TO ADD A LOCAL COMPONENT TO YOUR EXISTING BLOG:

  1. When writing about your usual niche add specific information useful to your local readers at the end. For example, if you’re a deals blogger add a few local deals at the end of your regular posts.
  2. Write some posts specifically for your local readers. To continue with our deals example, if your blog has lots of deals content it won’t hurt to write a few posts about deals that are only available locally. Put those in a separate category.
  3. Create categories for your geographic niche. When you include local info at the end of posts about your usual topics put those in the usual category AND the geo-targeted category. If a post is ONLY of interest locally, put it in the geo-targeted category only.
  4. Use local businesses as examples in posts about your usual topics.
  5. Write featured reviews, interviews, and human interest posts about topics of interest to your local audience. Your national or international readers are likely to consider these interesting for the same reason travel blogs are so popular. Those that don’t can skip over them because you’re putting them in a separate category.
  6. Offer a separate RSS feed for you geo-targeted category so non-local readers can opt out if they wish. I will research and add a post on how to do this as soon as time allows.
  7. Use these tips from professional copywriter Donna Anderson (@SheWritesALot) on writing compelling local content and read about or join our local blogging collaborations.
Just Retweet Twitter
Join us at Just Retweet ~ Bloggers supporting bloggers and small business

TWITTER LOCAL

Although there is an account for the Twitter Geo Team @Geo and there were posts about Twitter Places there does not appear to be anything happening as far as an official Twitter Local offering except for prompts from the Tweet Location Feature

Ways tools can determine location:

  1. Information in the Twitter profile.
  2. Locations mentioned in tweets.
  3. Profiles completed on third party sites.
  4. By pulling data from additional sources.

All our Twitter related tips and strategies can be reached through
Our Twitter Best Practices post on How To Use Twitter Effectively.

TWITTER SEARCH TOOLS

Listed in order of usefulness at the time I tested them:

  • Advanced Twitter Search ~ Type the location you are interested in into the Places /near this place field and select the number of miles around you want to search. Many of the results returned will be from Twitter users in that location. For large metro areas like Dallas Ft. Worth I use 50 miles. For small locations you may want to reduce that and if you are targeting an entire state you would select a city near the center of the state and select the number of miles it is from that city to the state boundary lines.
  • FollowerWonk ~ Includes an option to search your followers by location. Use this when you create Twitter account(s) for specific locations so you can follow those you already have relationships with in an existing Twitter account.

ONLINE TWITTER GEO TOOLS:

  1. WeFollow by City ~ Search for Twitter user by city; choose results ranked by most followers or most influential.
  2. TwellowHood ~ Simple tool to use – just type in a location to find Twitter users who mention that location in their Twitter profiles. Results are ranked by number of Twitter followers by default. While you may find disabled accounts Twellow is a good way to locate blogs, businesses and individuals by niche, interests, or location.
  3. TweetGrader ~ Twitter Elite by Top City – lists of the top 50 Twitter users for a given city, but although their blurb says the lists are ranked by number of followers that is clearly not true now. Exact criterion for ranking unknown. If you know how they are ranking, leave details and/or relevant links in the comments of this post and I will update this section.
  4. Twitaholic – while not intended for the purpose, you can find someone in the location you are interested in on Twitaholic, click on the location link, and you will get the top Twitter users for that location ranked by the number of followers they have.
  5. Twibs ~ Search Twibs for Twitter users by Geographic Location
  6. ChirpCity ~Find out what Twitter users in a city are tweeting OR what tweeters around the world are saying about a location. Searches by keyword so all results will not be what you’re seeking.
  7. Local Tweeps~ Looked like a good idea: Register a location for your Twitter account, then log into the site to follow other Twitter users in that location directly on the Local Tweeps site.  Unfortunately I was not able to get logged in and none of the four people listed on their about page has tweeted since at least Nov 15 or between Nov 15-Nov 22, 2011.
  8. NearbyTweets ~ I was unable to get this tool to pick up my location because I recently tweeted about New York and clicking preferences in FireFox and Chrome did nothing. If there is a way to manually enter your location I haven’t found it yet. If you are able to get this to work for you, please leave a comment with details.

TWITTER LOCAL TOOLS:

  • TwitterLocal.net – Adobe Air based tool that has to be downloaded to be used.

How to Find Local Twitter Users:

MEET LOCAL TWITTER USERS:

  • Tweetup Meetup Groups – Use this Tweetup link to search for Twitter Meetups around the world.
  • Twtvite ~ Site to create Tweetup groups by location or plan local tweetups

LOCAL iPhone Twitter Apps:

  • According to Mashable Local Tweets Post from Jun 8, 2009: “Four iPhone Twitter apps that include location-based search are Twinkle (free), TwitterFon (free), Tweetie ($2.99), and Twittelator Pro ($4.99). “

INACTIVE TWITTER APPS:

After I had come across so many Twitter apps that used to have local features that are no longer available I added this section so that I and others will not be looking for them.

  • Tweetmondo

Do you have tips or additional resources
for geotargeting Twitter accounts?

We’d love to hear from you. Just leave a comment
or use our contact tab. Relevant links always welcome.

Published by

Gail Gardner

Founder of GrowMap, Small Business Marketing Strategist, freelance writer and BizSugar Mastermind Community Manager.

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