Twitter search tools are everywhere now, and most of them are much faster than Google Alerts, but they focus on the text of a tweet. If you are looking for marketing contacts to follow, chasing every use of a keyword in tweets is casting a very wide net, and can waste a lot of time. For example, just because someone uses the word lawyer in a tweet doesn’t mean that they work in the legal profession. If you want to develop a quality list of contacts through Twitter, you are better off trying to find people who use your keywords in their username or bio.
That’s where Google Alerts comes in. If you build the right query, you’ll be notified every time a new Twitter account is created by someone who wants to tell the world they are closely associated with your keywords. The nice part of this approach is that you will discover new users as they create their accounts, which is when they are most likely to follow you back. We’ll work this procedure out step by step using legal contacts as an example. The information we are looking for is on a user’s Twitter profile page. If you look at the profile page for the user @legaltwitt you’ll see that the user name is in the title.
We can create a Google Alert for exactly the pattern of a profile page. This will keep us from getting alerts where the keyword just happens to be in a tweet:
intitle:”legal * on twitter” site:twitter.com
This query can be expanded to match other keywords in usernames, such as lawyer:
(intitle:”legal * on twitter” OR intitle:”lawyer * on twitter”) site:twitter.com
The next area of the page we want to match is the bio. There are two possibilities. The keywords can come right after the word bio. This is matched by:
(intext:”bio legal” OR intext:”bio lawyer”) site:twitter.com
The other case is when there are words between bio and the target keyword, which can be found with this pattern:
(intext:”bio * legal” OR intext:”bio * lawyer”) site:twitter.com
We can put all of these matches together in a single search:
(intitle:”legal * on twitter” OR intitle:”lawyer * on twitter” OR intext:”bio legal” OR intext:”bio lawyer” OR intext:”bio * legal” OR intext:”bio * lawyer”) site:twitter.com
Yeah, it’s a little over the top, but sometimes I like to geek out. 
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I’m impressed with your findings. I think this could be useful in terms of expanding our network; while reaching out to some people within our niche. I’m going to try this out, so far it works well with Google search. However, I can’t help but wondering, how does Google Alert determine among thousands of new users each day, which info to be sent to our mailbox, based on our keywords? Will the results be different from one person to another although with the same intext used above?
Also, how will the results be different from Twitlert?
Please excuse me for asking alot, but this seems like an interesting topic for me, love to know your opinion/feedback on this.
Greatly appreciated.
@wchingya
Social Media/Blogging
Ching Ya:
I haven’t seen any personalized differences in receipt of Google Alerts.
Google definitely limits the total number of alerts sent each day, there are no hard numbers, but some terms I watch that are popular seem to be limited to 30-40 a day. If you set up an alert that finds thousands of users a day, you won’t get alerts on all of them, which is a good thing. If it is targeted, like lawyers, doctors, etc., the volume isn’t too high to get them all.
I haven’t tried Twilert, since I like using TweetDeck for my Twitter searching. I do know that all the Twitter search tools I’ve tried watch the tweet stream, not the profile pages. I guess this is a result of the Twitter API. I hope Twitter does reveal the profiles through the API. It will allow some amazing apps, and some annoying bots, unfortunately.
This is really cool. You can also breakdown by location with something like (intext:”location * abilene”) site:twitter.com
Garrett:
Yep. Here are some examples:
http://www.alertrank.com/mrgooglealerts/2009/04/09/google-alerts-for-local-sales-leads-on-twitter/
The best part about this approach is that if you have a Twitter account that shows you are truly part of a specific industry or pay attention to a location, you will get a very high rate of follow-back. It isn’t how many people that follow you that matters, it’s which people. Getting a dozen lawyers or real estate agents in Texas to follow you can be more useful than thousands of random Twits around the world.
Adam
I completely agree with you on that one. 200 targeted followers are better than 1000 randoms in my book. Just like a website. Who cares about a million visitors if they aren’t converting. Where I was going with that is: bio + location = better targeted market.
Thanks for the great post
@garrettwinder
What a great tip! I have a lot to learn about Google searching and you’ve got me thinking now. We can come up with all sorts of goodies using this technique. Thanks!!
Hi,
This is great! Thanks for sharing.
Is there any way it could be filtered so you can look for both job title and location? E.g. If I wanted to find lawyers specifically from New York I could run a query to do so.
Thanks,
Stephen:
You can combine job and location in a single search query. Here is a post I have written about that:
http://www.alertrank.com/mrgooglealerts/2009/04/09/google-alerts-for-local-sales-leads-on-twitter/