It’s great to see so many professional organizers making use of Twitter. It is, after all, a fun and easy way to communicate with organizing colleagues that you may or may not have met before, and to learn about new organizing products and industry trends. But what’s it doing for your bottom line?
If you sell information products, offer virtual organizing services, or travel for speaking engagements, it’s quite possible that you’ll connect with people on Twitter who will ultimately buy from you or recommend you to others. On the other hand, if your main focus is on providing hands-on organizing services, your time will be better spent growing your local network. Fortunately, there are lots of different ways to find people in your area to follow on Twitter. Here are a few that I’ve found:
We Follow, Geofollow, and TwitR
Simply enter the name of your city or town in the search box to generate a list of people with that word in either their profile or their tweets.
Click on the map to zoom into the area you wish to target. You can then browse a list of people in that area. Currently this is only available for Canada and the USA.
Click on .USA or International, then click through the various subdirectories to find your locality.
Click on your country, then click through the various subdirectories to find your city or town.
Start with Top Cities, Top States, or simply a place name in the search box.
Unlike the services listed above, which are all web-based, TwitterLocal is a downloadable application which allows you to filter Tweets by location.
Of course, you probably won’t want to follow each and every person in your area! Some directories will allow you to refine your search by keyword, while with others you’ll need to browse the profiles to find people you’re interested in getting to know.
Ideally, you shouldn’t have to do all the work! To make it easy for others to find you too, you can create your own listing in most of these directories. Just remember, as always, not to enter your Twitter password into any site without carefully checking their privacy policy. Too many users have learned the hard way that entering your password on some sites may result in them using your Twitter account to promote their services to your followers. If this does happen to you, be sure to change your password immediately. You would hate to lose followers because they thought you had become a spammer!
It seems that there are new Twitter services every time you turn around, so I’m sure this list is not complete. If you know of other places to find or be found by local Twitter users, please let us know about it.
Super advice Janet and I can tell you it WORKS!
When I lived in Montreal last May, I started following a few people in the Quinte area and getting to know them through twitter. One of my followers told me about a women’s networking group in Trenton which I went to yesterday. I met some of my followers AND made some great connections. Being new to the Quinte area, people were happy to give me all sorts of information from where to buy saddle soap to where NOT to shop for groceries.
Also, some of my local followers give me news about the local area more than I would find in the newspaper.
Great experience and I’d recommend it to anyone!
Jacki Hollywood Brown´s last blog ..Expired Marine Flares
That’s great, Jacki! Being able to connect with people before you move to a new area is fantastic, especially when you have a service business and are faced with building up a new clientele from scratch.
Janet Barclay´s last blog ..Finding Tweeple in Your Area to Follow
Thanks for the mention. We of course believe we have the top offering when it comes to finding and following local Twitter users.
All suggestions welcome @geofollow