So you have a Twitter account; maybe a personal one or a business one. Or, if you are like me, you have both. Every day you read your timeline.  At some point you may find yourself asking the question, “How do I increase my relevant followers and find worthwhile information?”  The key is to search, follow and engage.  But how do you search and filter the volumes of information on Twitter in an organized and underwhelming way? The following are some tips to help make searching on Twitter easier and more productive:

• A good source to use when trying to sift through all of the content on Twitter is search.twitter.com.  Think about the following topics when entering your search query (term):

- Keywords

- Location-based words (include abbreviations and slang terms)

- #Hashtags being used

- Trending topics

• Search operators are what I would call shortcuts.  For example, you can type “social media” and it will find tweets containing the exact phrase “social media”. Another example is type “social media” near: “Dallas” and it will find tweets that contain the exact phrase “social media” that were sent near “Dallas”. You can find all the search operators at search.twitter.com/operators.
• Search.twitter.com/advanced gives you advanced capabilities to automatically construct your query without having to use search operators.  With this tool you can easily search based on words/phrases, people, places, dates, attitudes and others.
• You can also use the handy, basic Twitter search that is available at the top of your Twitter account.
• There are also numerous third-party applications available that vary on how and what they search for on Twitter. You can find these by doing a simple Google search.

Once you have searched and found relevant Twitter accounts, follow them and engage with them. In return, they will more than likely follow you back.  Not only have you increased your followers but you have struck up a conversation with a potential friend, client, and/or customer. Then it’s time for you to work your magic and convert the contact into a lead.

I won’t make you search for me, you can follow me on Twitter @andrea_sign and while you are there follow@agencyentourage to keep up on all things us and digital marketing.