First let’s talk about why you want to narrow the field of your Twitter followers. For the sake of this article I am going to say you are in the gardening industry and ship plants and gardening supplies within the USA only. Does it make sense to have people from Europe on your business Twitter followers? No, not really. You can’t do business with them, and since your main goal on Twitter is to build a relationship with potential customers, it doesn’t seem like a good use of Twitter to clutter up your account with people that will never do business with you.
Gathering Twitter followers just for the sake of having followers is a true waste of resources. You only have so many hours in a day and you should use those hours wisely. Having to sift through a pile of irrelevant Tweets makes your job of social marketing much tougher. Your goal should be to focus on your specific target audience. So how do you go about doing that?
First, you must find the people within the demographics of your target market. In this case, people who live in the USA who enjoy gardening. I use a free service at www.buzzom.com. This allows me to find followers based on my keywords. Yes, you can do this within Twitter itself, but it is very, very time consuming. Buzzom allows me to do it at a much quicker pace. Every day, I sign into my Buzzom account and do a keyword search for Twitter users within my niche. With one click I can follow 50 at a time. I build up my list slowly as I do not want Twitter to ban my account for unusual activity. Add 50 per day to start, then up it to 100 per day as your Twitter following increases. Within a very short amount of time, you will find you have a pretty decent following because a large number of the people you choose to follow will reciprocate and follow you in return. You can use the TwitIt feature within Buzzom to “flush” out the people who do not follow you every now and again to keep your follow/following ratios within a reasonable level.
Next, you can reach your market within Twitter by making sure you have your keywords within your profile and your Tweets. Using hash marks is a good way to have your Tweets found by people within your market. To do this, you just type #gardening at the end of each Tweet you do about gardening. This will help searchers find you, the search engines to find you and you will notice down the right hand side of your Twitter page a list of #topics.
By doing those two things, you will find your Twitter account to be more productive and more profitable as you are only puting your efforts into finding potential customers instead of just collecting followers.