Growing A Local Customer Base Through Twitter

Tuesday, December 6, 2011

Is your Businesses interested in growing its local customer base - Advanced Twitter Search can be a powerful tool that many aren't using. Several businesses have caught on that using keyword searches can help them help gain followers, but for a local business building up an account with people who may never frequent their business because they don’t live in your area isn't really that valuable. So why not use Twitter’s Advanced Search features with geotargeting? By doing so, you can find potential customers located nearby and start building new relationships and increase awareness.

Geotargeting is a great way to can find enthusiastic consumers nearby whom you can engage with and build a strong local following. - Have I peaked your interest? - Good, Start by heading over to Twitter Advanced Search and let's do a search for mentions of the word “restaurants” within 25 kilometers of London, ON.

The search results show potential followers and customers (and of course competitors too!). This gives you some insight into what people are both tweeting about and searching for:

Try spending some time searching various combinations of keywords and search parameters until you’ve found the most useful info for your business. You can automate this process by subscribing to the search feed with RSS. (and then you can then view the results each day)

From the results in the Twitter Search, you can then follow with those most likely to be in your "ideal" customer and begin to engage with them by simply responding to their tweets and starting a conversation.

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 all day, ever day - you can use this info as business research without dedicating the time to actually post messages (but it certainly helps if you do!).

A few quick tips to go along with using geotargeted Twitter searches for your local business:

Be Transparent: Being up front about who is tweeting for your business is a key element in gaining people's trust.

Please Don’t Spam: Using direct messages to your followers to promote your business is a difficult topic, my personal stance is never use automatic direct messages, especially those that are exclusively designed to sell. While it’s definitely OK to respond to followers with a direct message, sales tweets will probably cause you to lose followers.

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

Keep Going: These searches can be a great source for finding other keywords and search terms, so filtering out the relevant ones and keeping them on a spreadsheet with the results will go a long way toward refining your local search plan.

Share: If your business has multiple users contributing on your Twitter account, sharing the local search results (either through RSS or Twitter saved searches) with the team enables a more comprehensive plan to be built. This info can also be shared with the marketing department to help better inform their efforts.

Has your business used geotargeted Twitter searches for marketing your local business? Tell us about it in the comments.