Tonight I found an exciting tool called TweepSearch for intermediate Twitter users where you can search for a personal name of someone you want to follow, but more importantly, search for a keyword phrase….within the bio….of Twitter accounts. So far tonight, exactly 90 minutes after I began using this tool, I have followed almost 100 people in my target marketing and have been followed by about 30 of those. ‘Course, it is midnight right now, so I’ll bet I get more followers in the morning. But, here’s the important thing:

Sure, you can use all of these “cheat tweets” as I call them where you can get 100 followers a day or 19,990 followers a month, whatever dude. What’s really important to a business owner (like me and probably you) is that we get “targeted” followers rather than a bunch of competitors following us, for example.

TweepSearch does just that. Here, I’ll use an example. Here’s what it looks like:

One of my big targets is helping book authors with their Internet strategies. And, if they’re in Denver where I live, I should absolutely be interested in connecting. So, I went to TweepSearch.com and searched for “denver” and “author.”

8 pages of profiles popped up on screen at 20 per page. I could see the word “author” in their bio so I would scan their basic description and consider if each was a potential target for future business.

Here are 3 very crucial discoveries I made after that point.

1) I didn’t want to connect with just everyone with the word “author” in their bio. TweepSearch gives you enough of the bio where you can really tell who you want to follow and who you don’t. Like, someone who has no posts is a red flag to me. They don’t even want to participate on Twitter, so why connect with them?

2) Posts from the person I was newly following began appearing immediately on my Twitter account page, so I was prompt to respond. And, this action almost always resulted in a return follow. I could just sit there and watch my followers number go up! Interaction and replying to other peoples’ posts is so crucial!

3) Anyone I saw that had nearly no posts/contributions to Twitter, I bypassed as well. These are people who are glad to receive a follow but are only promoting whatever is in their profile page or bio. Twitter is supposed to be to meet people and be interactive with them. You and I don’t have time to waste on those that don’t understand the idea of getting to know people using social media.

TweepSearch.com is really a tool everyone on Twitter should be using. But, I’ve only heard about now by searching specifically for a tool to help me search for keywords with peoples Twitter “bios.” Twitter’s main search feature only searches post content. Real-time search engines like Collecta.com also only search through post content.

But, when you and I are trying to network for potential leads, we need to search for peoples’ bio info by keywords. Give it a whirl and let me know how it works for you.