Targeting an audience on Twitter is an intimidating task. However, there are quite a few smart tools available that enables you to connect with your market and develop highly curated audience lists. You must find the right people on Twitter and segment them to monitor and engage them more effectively.
First and foremost, you must target keywords/key phrases in your Twitter bio. Then, with the aid of a few tools you can easily create lists of your targets.
Those with a subscription can search all Twitter bios by keyword, location, name and URL to find the active profiles that is compatible to your needs. Further, you can also organize your search results into Twitter lists.
FollowerWonk is a free tool you can search profiles by keyword, name, location and URL. The results can then be exported to xls or csv. Twitter has the unique “people search” feature. Any user has access to this recently launched feature, however, searches are limited to keywords.
Find active users and influencers. You are creating a targeted list, so it is best to filter out those who haven’t tweeted in the recent past (30 to 60 days). Tools such as Social Bro allow you to select only those who have tweeted within certain period of time. It can also lead you to those with influence or who have a certain number of followers. In fact, the Social Bro search eliminates profiles that have been inactive for longer than one month.
Identify those who use a particular hashtag. Research on what hashtags would your audience use. It’s likely that your audience might be linked by certain products or events associated with specific hashtags. Brainstorm to find two to three hashtags that might lead you to your audience.
Introduce them into a tool such as TweetBe, conduct a search and develop a list of profiles that eminently fit your particular needs. It is important to organize your results. Once you’ve found profiles based on keywords, hashtags or locations, you should organize them into a list. Of course, any Twitter user can use the platform’s built-in “lists” feature to group certain profiles, creating up to 20 lists, with a maximum of 500 contacts each.
For most of you this might suffice; but if you need more advanced list-management features there are plenty of tools available – including SocialBro, Tweetbe.at, and Tweepi.com.
In creating a targeted Twitter lists, never forget your older contacts that might be a fit for your new projects.
After you create your segments, interact with them. Use a dashboard like HootSuite or Tweetdeck to redesign your new Twitter lists into columns so you can easily monitor your lists and build relationships through targeted content.