Twitter Tip #1: Using “Find People” To Find And Be Found

Now that we know who your target audience is, we now need to know how to go about finding them and being found by them.

The first tip I will talk about is on Twitter.com, a link near the top of the page called, Find People.

We’ll use the same target audience scenario from the previous post:

1. People who love, need or use different kinds of shoes
2. People who live in or near Rochester NY…and when you overlap these two sets, you get… 
3. People who love, need or use different kinds of shoes and live in or near Rochester – those most likely to buy from you…in addition, you may also want to target…
4. Industry peers (competitors) to share knowledge and peruse & pursue their established lists of followers. 

Find People is a search tool that sorts through Twitter usernames and their name. So if we search on ‘rochester’ (we are using the default tab, Find on Twitter), you will see something like this:

Since you are targeting everyone in Rochester, you should be following all of these Twitter users (don’t be too aggressive). You have to be a little careful with searching locations… just make sure the user is from your location.

Once you’ve exhausted your resources with Rochester, now we would move on to the other part of your target audience, ‘shoes’. When you are searching on shoes or sneakers or high-tops (be creative) or whatever your target phrase is, you’ll likely get some enthusiast accounts, but with how Find People works (searching on usernames & names), you will likely see many of your peers. It would be good to follow these accounts as well to exchange ideas. You can also spend some time going through their list of established followers who could also be your followers and… potential clients.

So that’s how we go about using Find People to…ummm, find people. Now let’s figure out how we can be found using the same tool.

A person who likely uses Find People is either browsing for a specific person/business that they know… or they’re searching on keywords of interest in hopes of discovering NEW people to follow. 

In our example, a person who loves shoes might go to Find People and type in ‘shoes’. Thus, your goal would be to come up under this search so that you can be found by this enthusiast, followed, and potentially sell them your products and services. 

Since Find People sorts through username and actual name, it makes sense that this is where you should be focusing some attention.

Let’s take the username… if you don’t already have a Twitter account, consider including a keyword as part of that username so that you can potentially be found for that phrase. In the example, you might want to choose a username of RochesterShoes or Rochester_Shoes, etc. The problem is most people reading this post (all two of you) probably already have an established username. So this is a bit more difficult to control, plus real estate on Twitter usernames are being eaten up like they were dot com names. You could always create a second profile, or after creating this second profile, redirect the original account to the new Twitter profile. This is not always the best answer though, and there’s actually another way (an easier way) that you can be found by your target audience.

Let’s take a look at my profile for a minute. If someone wanted to find me, they could type in my usename, yllib, and I would come up. They could also find me by typing in my real name, Bill Bouchard. But look at the actual name that I’ve entered… “Bill Bouchard – SEO“… if you do another search on the keyword, ‘SEO’, I’m currently coming up on the first page for that phrase. So someone who’s interested in SEO might go up to Find People, do a search, find me there, and potentially follow me. So now, I am reaching my target audience passively, less work… cool! So, to modify your name, click on the Settings link on Twitter and you’ll see the Name field (the first field on the page). There are character limits for the Name field [20]. The key to this is striking a balance between listing your name (or brand) while having enough characters left to include your keyword (aka.. your product or service).

So back to the original example, you would make the Name include the word ‘shoes’ if possible, you might even be able to include Rochester if your brand name is short enough.

So we’ve seen how Find People is a good tool for doing basic searches for a target audience and also tips for getting found, but it does have its limits, namely you can only find people by their name. In the next post, I’ll get into some more in depth data mining techniques that will help you really start to hone in on your target audience.