Businesses interested in increasing their local customer base will find a powerful tool in Twitter Search. By using geotargeting, they can find enthusiastic consumers nearby to engage with and build a local following.

One of the issues with using Twitter for local business marketing is that by gaining followers through keyword searches, you’ll build up your account with people who will never patronize your business because they don’t live in your area. But by using Twitter’s advanced search features with geotargeting, you can find potential customers located nearby and build a relationship with them, making them aware of your business.

To begin, let’s head over to Twitter Advanced Search and start some geotargeted keyword searches. For example, if you’re interested in finding people in Austin, TX, who are into wine, and perhaps wine bars, you’ll search for the following: [wine bar near:"Austin, TX" within:15mi] as seen below:

The results page will be full of relevant potential followers and customers (and competitors!), giving you some insight into what people are both tweeting about and searching for:

Search for various combinations of keywords and search radius (you might want to increase the surrounding area mileage, for example) until you’ve hit upon the most relevant for your business. In order to automate this process, subscribe to the search feed with RSS, and you can then view the results each day in your feed reader.

Once you see the results from Twitter Search, you can then follow those most likely to be in your customer base and begin to engage them – not selling to them yet, but merely responding to their tweets. One especially helpful tactic is answering questions they pose, as they relate to your business or area of expertise. Make yourself useful to them as a local resource. For example, responding to a request for a recommendation for a local wine shop or bar, or even answering a question about which wine goes with which foods, will help to set yourself up as one of the go-to guys for that topic.

Businesses can also gain a greater understanding of their market and their niche by simply listening to the conversations happening on Twitter, which means that you don’t have to be tweeting away all day – you can use the info as business research without dedicating the time to actually post messages (but it certainly helps if you do!).

A few quick pointers on using geotargeted Twitter searches for your local business:

Be transparent: Being up front about who you are and who you represent is a key element in gaining their trust. Acting as if you aren’t the business owner or employee in order to be seen as objective might come back to bite you, so be open about that.

Don’t spam: Using direct messages to your followers to promote your business is a divisive topic, with most of the long-time users staying away from automatic direct messages and those which are solely designed to sell. While it’s certainly OK to respond to followers with a direct message, unsolicited sales tweets may cause you to lose those people, so do it sparingly.

Be helpful: Pointing people to resources from other businesses isn’t giving away all your business, it’s being helpful. There’s no need to be always pushing your business, because by helping people find what they need, you’re being social, not a salesperson, and people do remember that.

Keep going: Those searches can be a great source for finding other keywords and search terms, so filtering out the relevant ones and making a spreadsheet with the results will go a long way toward refining your local search strategy.

Share: For companies that have multiple users on their Twitter accounts, sharing the local search results (either through RSS or Twitter saved searches) with the team enables a more comprehensive plan to be built. That information can also be shared with the marketing department to help better inform their efforts.

How have you used geotargeted Twitter searches for your local business?

Derek Markham is a writer, a father, a WordPress addict, and social media butterfly who loves to share what’s new and interesting in his world in under 140 characters. Hit him up with an @ reply anytime for help, advice, or just to say hey!

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