Don’t Count This Bird Out!

Many businesses struggle with how to use Twitter to grow their business.  In particular, brick and mortars often time struggle to find people in their geographic area to ‘tweet to’.  Understandably, in smaller areas outside major city centres, the population of Twitter users is generally lower, potentially making it more difficult to drive business through your door.  However, with Social Media in general becoming more mainstream, I believe in the not too distant future, this will become less of an issue.

With Twitter usage up dramatically lately,  it would appear that many are beginning to realize its potential to really help drive their business forward.   Check out this interview that Chris Brogan did recently with Restaurateur Joe Sorge who owns AJ Bombers in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.   See how Twitter has in his words, ‘built his business’.  Then follow @ajbombers on Twitter to see how Joe puts Twitter to work!  For that matter, follow Chris Brogan too – @chrisbrogan.

Then, to help you build your local twitter following, check out these 3 applications:

1. Twellow.com

Twellow is the Twitter Yellow Pages.  As a brick and mortar, you can not only create a great profile for yourself or your business on Twellow, but if you click on the ‘Twellowhood’ tab at the top of the page, you will be able to create targeted searches within a specific geographic area.  Within Twellow, you can even follow people on Twitter and start to grow your network.

Helpful tip: When creating your own profile, make sure you click on ‘expanded bio’ and include all relevant info for your business and make sure you maximize your exposure in the categories section. You are allowed 10.  Make good use of them!

2. Nearbytweets.com

Nearbytweets allows you to search by location and by keyword. By keying in these two items, Nearbytweets will produce a stream of tweets from that and surrounding area that include that keyword.  This is great not only for finding new prospects, but as a business owner, this is great for reputation management.  You can really keep your ear to the ground and listen for any tweets that have to do with your brand and respond to them quickly.

Helpful tip:  Nearbytweets will allow you to save your locations and keywords to streamline the process. You will find this under the preferences tab.  Nearbytweets also allows you to click on any individual tweet to get more information or review an individual’s profile. You can then follow that person/organization from there.

3. Chirpcity.com

Chirpcity is another app that will do location searches for you. It will bring up the image, username and individual tweets.  If you  click on their image, you will be taken to their page, where you can then review their profile and follow them if you so wish.

Helpful tip: If there is one particular tweet you are interested in, you can press ‘view tweet’.  This will take you to the individual’s profile page where that one tweet will be displayed and you can reply to or retweet that particular tweet right there. That’s a handy option. Saves you sifting through all their tweets.

There are other applications out there however, many have pitfalls.  Tweepsearch for example,  has a great concept in that it will bring up the person/organizations bio, and show you their followers, friends and updates, but they are sorely out of date.   It says my last recorded update was 4 months ago. Actually it was more like 2 hours ago and my friend/follower information is also incorrect.   So you will want to choose apps that are current and give you the most accurate information.

If you are still struggling with Social Media and wonder how you can make it work for your business, it would be best to seek out the assistance of a Social Media Specialist.    As a Social Media Specialist VA, I offer coaching and consulting, assessment and strategy, profile setup – customization and optimization and some ongoing support and maintenance, particularly for my blogging clients.

How about you? What applications do you use to build your twitter base?  I would love to get your feedback.  Here on my blog, you’ll get commentluv.  That’s great for all you bloggers out there. Leave a comment and you can leave a link back to your own blog!  But you don’t have to be a blogger to leave a comment. I’d love to hear from all of you.

While physically located in , Ontario where I live with my family, as a VA, I’m virtually yours anywhere….

Joanne