Twitter Goes Local – What It Means For You & Your School
Over the past several days, Twitter has rolled out a new feature that will allow you to search for other Twitter users in your immediate area. This is huge news for schools and other such local business entities because it allows you to narrow down your communication efforts and specifically target the individuals in your immediate area.
While attaching locations to tweets has been possible for several months now through multiple third-party applications, Twitter.com itself has done little in regards to “geo-location” until very recently. As far as I can tell, it was on March 11th, 2010, that Twitter first started to roll out these new geo-location options.
You should note, however, that turning the geo-location feature on is entirely optional and many Twitter users will simply opt out of using this specific feature for whatever reason. That said, many Twitter users will activate this new feature… and this is good news for you and your school!
The following is a screen shot showing the check box that you are required to select in order to activate the new geo-location options.
You should also note that if you do decide to activate the “Tweet Location” option and then later decide to opt out of this specific feature, you can go back and delete all location data from your previous tweets if so desired.
Once this feature is activated, the geo-location data is easily and automatically included with your tweets. Any tweet that has a location attached to it will appear with a small location icon located at the end of the byline of that tweet. Clicking on the icon will bring up a Google Map showing the location where that tweet was sent.
The reason this feature is such big news is because up until now it was a somewhat difficult process to find active Twitter users in your immediate area. Up until this time, Twitter was a global phenomenon and unless you had a global business, connecting with the people in your local vicinity was difficult, if not impossible.
But now, with these new features enabled, it is easier than ever to find the parents, teachers, students, and community members that are both active in and around your school.
To find Twitter users in your immediate area, there are several ways to search them out.
Twitter Search
One of the best ways to find local Twitter users is simply to search for them on Twitter Search. Using the search box on this page, you can simply enter the name of your town or city and get a real-time stream of all the people tweeting from your location (or near it). The results here are based on the location field of people’s Twitter bios and this new geo-location date.
To search for Twitter users in you area, you can simply enter the name of the town you happen to be in or you can use a search code like this to find Twitter users within a specific range of your postal zip code:
near:93001 within:5mi
You will need to change the zipcode in the search above to your local code. Also, you might try searching for people in a 10 mile, 20 mile, or even 30+ mile radius (depending on the size of the city your school happens to be situated in).
Twellowhood
Another easy way to find local Twitter users is to search for your city on Twellow.com.
Twellow is a sort of like a yellow pages directory for Twitter. It allows you to search for Twitter users by topic, name or location.
In order to navigate the site and find local Twitter users in your area, simply visit the site, click on the map to zoom into your area, and browse the list of local tweeters. The site even lets you view recent tweets and follow new users directly from their Twellow listing page.
Over To You
Now it’s your turn to get out there and starting using Twitter to connect with your parents, teachers, students and community members.
If you are not yet using Twitter in your school or you are unsure as to how to use this new tool to your advantage, please consider signing up for the Social Media Schools Master Course. The course is designed to take you by the hand and teach you everything you need to know in order to get up and running with Twitter and Facebook in your school – ASAP!
And for those of you who are already using Twitter in your school, how else (besides the methods I have described above) have you been able to successfully connect with the people in your immediate area on Twitter? Leave a comment below and let me know!
