Using Twitter to Find Local Students for Your Dance or Fitness Classes

Twitter is a great marketing tool because it gives you access to a targeted audience who choose to follow you and read your messages. These people want to know more about you and what you have to offer. People following your tweets want to know about upcoming classes, specials, events and even advice about dance or fitness. Obviously for dance studios, Zumba and fitness instructors teaching local classes, you will want to build a base of Twitter followers that are local to your area. Here are a few ways you can find local people on Twitter.

1. Search for your business name

Find out what people are saying about you and/or your classes. Answering questions and responding to complaints can build lots of goodwill. You can easily reply to them by using the "reply" button under their tweet.

2. Use Twitter's "Tweets Near You" feature

Simply enter a search term, such as "dance" or "zumba" or "diet" and then click the tab that says "tweets near you." You will get a list of people tweeting that are located near you.

3. Follow other Local People on Twitter

Search for local businesses or people you know of locally in town and follow them. Chances are they will have other local followers that you might be able to connect with.

4. Twellowhood and Tweepz

Using a map on Twellowhood you can pinpoint your geographic location and then find out who is located in that area.

Similarly, on Tweepz you can search for local people on Twitter by entering "loc: " and then your location in their search field.

5. Use Twitter Search

Search.twitter.com is the Twitter search engine. The advanced search function allows you to search near a place. Simply enter your town and you'll get results of anyone tweeting from near your location.

6. iPhone applications

Some Twitter applications on the iPhone have built in features for locating nearby Twitter users. They allow you to search for Twitterers nearby to your exact location, as determined by the geo-location feature of your iPhone. Four iPhone Twitter apps that include location-based search are Twinkle, TwitterFon, Tweetie, and Twittelator Pro.

7. TwitterLocal

TwitterLocal creates an automatically updated real-time stream of the location searches possible with Twitter Search. The AIR app, which will run in the background and notify you of new tweets from your area, makes it very easy to keep a constant eye on your local Twitterverse and find interesting or like-minded local Twitter users to follow.

8. Nearby Tweets

Nearby Tweets automatically determines where you are and loads up a list of recent tweets and Twitter users within a specific radius. You can even change location, radius, and add keywords.

9. Twitterholic

Twitterholic is a list of the top Twitter users, but it can also show you the top users in your local metro area. Simply navigate to your own Twitterholic page then find the line about how you rank in your location and click on the link to your metro area. Twitterholic will then load up a list of the most popular Twitter users in your town or city.

Finally, once you find people on Twitter you will need to connect with them. Follow them and maybe they'll follow you back. You can also RT (retweet) their posts and include their username so when they search for who is talking about them you'll come up. Or Reply to a tweet they posted and say hello. This may also make them want to follow you. Good luck!