How do I Find Twitter Users in My Town
The number of twitter users has nearly quadrupled over the past few months, and as more people sign up for the hot social networking service, it becomes more useful. Twitter is enabling its users with better home use, better customer service and hints of aps. Twitter can become infinitely more beneficial, though, if you use it to connect with people in your town.
Finding local Twitter users to connect with is great for networking, but also for getting relevant, real-time, local information about things like jobs, news, politics, weather, food, and more. Someone tweeting from London can’t help you find a good place to eat in New York City, and if you live in Chicago, tweets about the weather in Los Angeles won’t be very enlightening. Here are some ways to locate Twitter users in your town to help you get the most out of Twitter.
Twitter Search
One of the best ways to find local Twitter users is simply to search for them on Twitter SearchThe advanced page of Twitter’s search engine has an option to search “Near this place.” You can simply enter your town and get a real-time stream of all the people tweeting from your location or near it. The results are based on the location field of people’s Twitter bios, which due to geo-location for people tweeting from their phones can be very accurate.
Twellowhood
The TwellowHood is a local directory of Twitter users from the site TwellowTwellow is a sort of yellow pages directory for Twitter, allowing you to search for Twitter users by topic or name. The TwellowHood is a reverse location look up for the greater Twellow directory that lets you drill down into your town or city and find local Twitter users.
The site is very simple to use, just click on the map to zoom into your area and browse the list of local tweeters. The site even lets you view recent tweets and follow new users directly from their Twellow listing page.
IPhone Apps
There are a ton of Twitter applications on the iPhone, and some of them have built in features for locating nearby Twitter users. Each of them basically functions the same, allowing you to search for Twitterers nearby to your exact location, as determined by the geo-location feature of your iPhone. Four iPhone Twitter apps that include location-based search are Twinkle(free), TwitterFon(free), Tweetie ($2.99), and Twittelator Pro ($4.99). If you know of any others, please add them in the comments.
Localtweeps is attempting to organize the local Twitterverse using a hashtag. The idea is that users add themselves on the Localtweeps site by registering their zip code, then any time they tweet about something relevant to their local audience, they append the #lt hashtag. Localtweeps them parses those tweets on their web site and publishes them in a city-restricted stream.
For now, most cities I looked at tend to have an overwhelming number of “Just listed myself” tweets that the site asks you to send out when you join, but the idea of organizing local content by hashtag has merit. However, if the idea catches on, the Localtweeps site itself might not be necessary. If people take to the idea of using a specific hashtag to designate tweets of local interest, then regular Twitter search for that tag restricted to your location will reveal a real-time stream of those tweets.
TwitterLocal
TwitterLocal is a dead-simple Adobe AIR application (meaning it will run on Windows, Mac, and Linux) with one purpose: finding and tracking tweets emanating from specific locations. Essentially, TwitterLocal creates an automatically updated real-time stream of the location searches possible with Twitter Search. The AIR app, which will run in the background and notify you of new tweets from your area, makes it very easy to keep a constant eye on your local Twitterverse and find interesting or like-minded local Twitter users to follow.
Nearby Tweets is essentially a fresh coat of paint on the local aspect of Twitter’s own search engine. The site automatically determines where you are, and loads up a list of recent tweets and Twitter users within a specific radius. You can change location, radius, and add keywords, and the results are a lot more visually appealing and easier to navigate than Twitter’s search engine.
Happn.in is a new local Twitter utility that tracks trends in specific metro areas. While it’s not specifically designed for finding local users, if yours is one of the 52 cities covered by the site, you can use it to locate users talking about what’s hot in your area. For example, a recent trending topic in my city has been the band “Pearl Jam,” due to their performance on “The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien.” I’m a huge Pearl Jam fan, so in this instance, Happn.in has helped me find some fellow 90s grunge rock aficionados to follow in my area.
Twitterholic
Twitterholic is the web’s definitive list of the top Twitter users, but it can also show you the top users in your local metro area. Simply navigate to your own Twitterholic page, then find the line about how you rank in your location and click on the link to your metro area. Twitterholic will then load up a list of the most popular Twitter users in your town or city.
This list won’t be all inclusive, because Twitter users with a small number of followers will only be on the list if they have previously crawled their stats on Twitterholic. Still, it is a good way to find some of the more influential (or at least popular) Twitter users in your area, and those are people you may want to follow.
