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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