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Twitter is one of the best ways to find online leads for marketing purposes. People on Twitter are more accessible, and open to engage with you than in other online venues. It's easy to set up Google Alerts to notify you as soon as a new Twitter account is created or modified with the keywords related to your marketing efforts. Twitter has its own search tool, but that only searches within users' messages. It doesn't let you find people who use your keywords in their user name or profile information. Searching tweets will often cast too wide a net, but if the word is in their name or profile, they are telling the world that this really matters to them.
For example, there are hundreds of thousands of mentions of doctor on Twitter, but only 700 people use it in their bio, and less than 500 have it in their user name. If you wanted to individually contact Twitter users about a new medical service, which groups would represent more qualified leads?
The techniques used here are based on a more advanced knowledge of Google Alerts syntax, so you might need to check out our tutorial pages if you need help.
The secret to setting up Google Alerts to notify you when a Twitter account is created or modified is understanding how information is presented on a user's profile page. This is the page you want, rather than individual tweets.
This example shows 3 areas that we can have Google Alerts monitor: twitter name and user's name in the title, location in the text, and bio in the text. We can search each of these separately or all at once.
We can search pages on any single site with the site: operator. For example, here are all the Twitter pages with the word doctor:
doctor site:twitter.com
If you try this search, you'll see that most of the results are for tweets where people happen to use the word doctor. We want to restrict this to just profile pages.
Twitter lets you record 2 names in your account. Your Twitter name and your real name. As the picture above shows, both of these values appear in the title of the profile page, so we can search for them with the intitle: operator. We only want profile pages, so this has the pattern of the word we want and the words "on twitter" in the title. We will put in an asterisk after the word we are searching for, to make sure it will match the word doctor anywhere in the user name. This search will find just the profile pages with the word doctor in the title:
intitle:"doctor * on twitter" site:twitter.com
The other part of a profile to search for keywords is the user's bio. This can be done with the intext: operator. This time we want the word bio and our keyword even if they are separated by other words, so we'll search for "bio * doctor":
intext:"bio * doctor" site:twitter.com
The same approach can be used to find Twitter users based on their account's location value. Let's try searching for anyone in NY state:
intext:"location * ny" site:twitter.com
Then we can combine our name and bio search with the location to get all the Twitter doctors in NY:
(intitle:"doctor * on twitter" OR intext:"bio * doctor") intext:"location * ny" site:twitter.com
