8 Tips for Successful Lead Prospecting With Twitter Advanced Search Advanced Search is a powerful tool for data analysis available to every entrepreneur with a Twitter account. Think of it as a Big Data for everybody.
By Brett Relander Edited by Dan Bova
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
One of the key features of successful lead generation is the ability to target the right audience at the right time. And the savvy internet marketer is always on the lookout for tools that can help them sift easily through information on social media and unearth real prospects. One such feature is Twitter Advanced Search.
Related: 6 Steps to Finding Your Twitter Audience
If social media marketing is part of your business, you should definitely develop a strategy to capture information through this tool. You only need an active account on Twitter to follow-up with the leads more easily but, even if marketing on Twitter is not very high on your priority list right now, you can gain interesting information about your niche.
Twitter has gained currency across demographics, everyone's on it. Everyone has an opinion and everybody loves to use hashtags. A creative person can do a lot with the resources available on the advanced search page.
Advanced Search on Twitter is easy to use. Combining it with knowledge of search operators makes it twice as powerful. There are a lot of permutations and combinations possible. The fields are straightforward and easy to understand but the implications are immense.
Some ideas for making effective use of Advanced Search:
1. Search. Search usernames and tweets by usernames. References to usernames indicate the general mood and public perceptions about a username.
2. Track. Track conversations between two usernames. For example, this feature allows you to track conversations between your competitor and their main evangelists on Twitter.
Related: Five Ways to Use Twitter for Marketing That You Might Not Know About
3. Narrow. Narrow down the geographical field of the tweets. Find out what people in a given area are searching for. Restaurants near a specific location used with the relevant phrase or hashtag can throw up powerful clues about local markets. For example, "Restaurants" near: Dallas within: 5 miles.
4. Questions. Search for tweets that ask questions containing your chosen keyword or phrase.
5. Filter. In any search string, you can filter out unwanted words with the "none of these keywords" field:. This means the search will come up with only those tweets that are without the filtered term(s).
6. Trends. Follow trends and search by hashtags to get real-time intelligence about your niche.
7. When. Search for tweets within a given date range only.
8. Multilingual. Choose to search for information in all languages or any of 51 languages.
Use the Twitter advanced search feature in conjunction with Twitter tools such as TweetBeep and Twilert in order to track conversations that mention your chosen search terms. This will allow you to pick up information that can be used for reputation management, increasing follower count and tracking responses to tweets.
Make the advanced search feature on Twitter a part of your outreach program and you will see that it contributes real value.
