Finding Your Target Market on Twitter Using the Search Function

Finding your target market on Twitter can be a long, laborious task. Unless you want to chalk up a long line of irrelevant followers that couldn’t care less about what you have to say, you’re going to have to do some legwork using the Twitter search function.

Fear not though. That legwork will be well worthwhile once you’ve collated a lean, mean, tweeting machine of followers. Here’s how to get started.

Basic search

In order to put together your legion of loyal (and relevant) followers, you’re going to need to make the most of the Twitter search function.

Start at the very beginning. Know somebody that will be interested in what you’re offering? Know somebody who knows somebody that will be interested in what you’re offering? Then start putting names in that little box. You’re not going to get a huge amount of followers this way, but it’s a good start.

Next, put your keywords or key phrases into the Twitter search box and see what turns up. Keywords will be essential to finding your target market, so do your research first. If you’re lucky you’ll strike it rich first time. Chances are though you’ll need to make use of the advanced search.

Advanced search

Now, the advanced search allows you to get down to the nitty gritty of finding your target market. Whilst the basic search will throw a lot of random users at you, the advanced search can be tailored to find (almost) exactly who it is you’re looking for.

Here you can use a bunch of keywords and key phrases, opting to boycott others. Hashtags can be included as one of your searchable fields, while you can even specify the language you’re looking for. If all that wasn’t enough, you can search for users in specific geographical locations, or find a tweet that was positive or negative. With so many fields to work in your favour, you can really tighten the net and find the ideal followers.

#Hashtag search

Now, how about a spot of real-time searching?

If you’ve been using Twitter for any amount of time, it should be safe to say that you know about hashtags. Hashtags are a great way of labelling your tweets so that others know what you’re talking about. But there’s more to it than that.

Hashtags actually offer the opportunity to search for a specific keyword that relates to your business. Put #keyword into the Twitter search bar and you’ll be presented with a list of all tweets that have used #keyword, as well as the most popular.

This can be crucial to finding your target market, not least because it gives you access to those tweeters that are actively talking about what you’re looking for, which means they’re at the very least, potential new followers.