A New Search Tool For Finding Local Twitter Users

I love Twitter. Anyone who is around me for even a few minutes and brings up Twitter quickly gets the picture. But one of the things I've always wanted to know is "who else in New Orleans" is on Twitter? Seems a lot of folks also want to know who tweets in their town and a lot of companies would like to be able to see/find tweeters in whatever town the company has a rooftop.

Currently, probably the best method is Twellow. But the problem with Twellow and pretty much every other local twitter finder service is that you can only look up one city. So if I use Twellow to search for NOLA tweeters I can only see folks that claim New Orleans as their home city in their profile. If I want the whole DMA, I need to search for each suburb (Metairie, Kenner, etc.) and then manually compile a list.

Now this is fine for my hometown where I'm quite familiar with the geography, but what if I'm a brand manager with a product that has distribution in lots of cities around the USA? Maybe I'm a multi-market retailer or grocery chain, matters not, what matters is I'd want to be able to find and maybe talk to all the folks in a particular DMA who are on Twitter and who if I follow them, will follow me back. A tool to find all those folks in one easy search doesn't exist. Until today.

I gave this challenge to our interactive folks here at Zehnder Communications. They were able to create a pretty simple workaround using Google's search tool to build my local tweeter directory. The problem is, it still requires a person to manually create each DMA. Which is where you come in dear reader.

Go visit the Zehnder Local Twitter Users search tool and help us help you by building the search string for your town. When you get there we'll give you a few simple instructions, a few form fields and presto, you'll have created a DMA level twitter user search for your DMA. Best of all, if folks who come by after you don't want the entire DMA, they don't need to take it. They can turn off the suburb cities you assign to the master DMA and then just work with those results.

Best of all, the tool not only tells you how many tweeters there are, it also lists them so that you can go follow whichever ones seem to be the most interesting. Or all of them if you like. 

Our plan is to leave the page up forever and offer it free to anyone who wants to use it. Sort of our little contribution to the Twitter community if you will. NOTE: this isn't a perfect search tool. If a person uses N'awlins or their longitude/latitude as their "city" in their bio, they won't show up in this search. You'll only find folks that list a city that is in your search string in their bio.

So, do me a favor. Pop over, check out the tool and then leave me comments here as to what you think about it. If you think it has some value, be sure to tweet out a link back to this post so we can get a lot of people using the tool. The more folks that go in and build a DMA profile, the faster we'll have a really robust Twitter directory of local tweeters!