A quick tip today on how to search for quite literally anyone conversing about a certain topic, which can be useful in seeking out clients, connections, partners and like-minded people, using hashtags.org. This can work if you are searching in general or if you need to find someone in a niche, you just need to customise the hashtag search to a niche tag or keyword.
For the purposes of this demo I’m going to do a general search below so you can see how you can use this technique in your own business.
Step #1
Choose your hashtags. For this I will be using the search “need a virtual assistant” – it’s not really a hashtag as such but it’s more targeted, and it will get results, there are multiple other hashtags you can use depending on the type of role you play in the industry, and the services you offer.
For example, if you are a VA who specialises in social media such as Twitter maintenance, or technical services, such as web development, creative services such as graphic design, or financial services such as bookkeeping, you can drill down further and get more specific with your tags.
Step 2
Go to hashtag.org and do a search for that keyword, it will bring up a bunch of results like the ones in the screen shot below.
* So as you can see here we have a couple of examples.
Step #3
Sift through the tweets to see if you find anything interesting. If you do, check the owner of the tweet out, or if it’s a retweet, checkout out the original source of the tweet, follow them and start tweeting!
Below I have done a targeted social media assistant search using “socialmedia assistant” putting the hashtag in, and then a space, and then the word assistant.
Here we have an example result, @SintaPhite “I’m still seriously interviewing personal assistant position. You’ll learn #socialmedia jargons #marketing and more! Must be detail oriented” – and here she is, it’s that simple:
Her tweet that I found on hashtags.org is in the image above at the bottom. Sinta looks like someone who could be great to work with, she is a professional, and most of all, she is already looking for the type of assistance I want to offer – plus it looks like she provides some training which is great for any new VA’s just starting out in the industry. She may be looking for an offline assistant, but social media and marketing can be conducted purely online, so she may not realise the benefits of hiring a virtual assistant just yet, a perfect opening to introduce yourself, it took me less than a minute to find this potential client – imagine how long it would take to find them offline…
You can apply this to really anything or anyone you are searching for. It’s fun, and a great way of doing a quick lookup for your favourite hashtags in real-time if you prefer not to get email notifications from your Twitter tools.
Do you use hashtags as part of your Twitter activities?
