Deckers Marketing

For many Twitterers, building your local network is vastly more important than following every entertainment, sports, and tech celebrity, you can get your browser on. But the act of finding a couple local followers and then clicking through to see who they’re following is going to take days and weeks before you even begin to scratch the surface. Not to worry. There are several apps and websites that will help you find your local Twitterers with ease. Here are five of them.

NearbyTweets.com is a web-based service that finds people within a radius around the city you specify, or for specific keywords. You’ll get a graphical representation of Twitterers nearby, or Tweets from nearby. (They’re usually the same.)

TwitterFall is another web-based service, and is a great way to track a specific #hashtag or topic. I’ve used it during presentations to field questions from the audience, and can even search for specific tags, like #Indianapolis or #Indiana. It’s not the fastest way to find people in your area, but you can find the people who are most concerned with your city. You can use TwitterFall if you want to find people who didn’t list their location on their Twitter profile. (Note: List your location on your Twitter profile!)

TwitterLocal – The only non-web app of the bunch, TwitterLocal is an Adobe Air-based application (like TweetDeck, which if you’re not using, you need to get). TwitterLocal uses Twitter’s location-based search API that filters Tweets based on location. Follow people from your town or from a city you’ll be visiting. Great for salespeople who need to get a feel of a town before they arrive.

Twitterholic.com is a web-based Twitter grader that counts your followers and compares you to other local Twitterers. Then it ranks you for your chosen location. If you’re one of those people who didn’t fill in your Twitter profile, you won’t show up. At the same time, I noticed at least one local Twitterer missing from Twitterholic’s ranks, so I’m wondering about the accuracy of the system.

Twitter Grader, from HubSpot, is one of four Web 2.0 grading tools they offer (they also have Website Grader, Press Release Grader, and Facebook Grader), and a great way to find the Twelite in your area. One feature this app has over Twitterholic, Twitter Grader gives you a grade out of 100 based on your followers, followees, and updates. (Twitterholic lets you rank people based on followers, followees, and updates, but doesn’t have the grade feature that HubSpot’s Grader has.)

One feature each of these programs is missing, and I would love to see, is something to let me know whether I’m already following this person or not (like Twitter Karma does). That way, I can save myself a few extra clicks to find out whether I’m already following them.

To make things even more complicated, Twitter Grader and Twitterholic don’t have a button that takes you immediately to a person’s Twitter page, but rather their site page that gives you further details about them. Sure it’s useful, but if you’re trying to follow your local Tweeple quickly, the added step is a minor annoyance (but nothing worth getting upset about).

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