How to Find Niche Markets with Twitter
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Using Twitter to Find Niche Markets
If you want to start a business, have you wondered how to find niche markets?
With twitter, you can find trends, hot topics, and gaps in the current market which can give you insight about the next great niches.
Twitter is a interesting marketing tool because it gives you access to what people really talk about when they are not holding back. Any marketing survey is bound to get a canned response. On twitter, people are talking naturally, but they are doing it publicly, and allowing you to listen in.
Twitter is also a good tool to see what people care about, and what their concerns and questions are. All of this adds up to finding niche market material.
Step 1: To find niche markets on twitter, first you need to discover out what conversations people are having.
Go to hashtags.org and find out what which keywords are common in conversations. Hashtags are ways that people mark their tweets as part of a bigger conversation.
Look for trends and conversations that interest you or that seem new and exciting. Use your intuition. Twitter changes quickly, so a trend one day may be gone the next. This is just to brainstorm ideas.
If your enjoy using this tool, there are many other tools to watch the trends in twitter. The article "15 Fascinating Ways to Track Twitter Trends" has a very useful list of other twitter trend tracking tools.
Step 2: Once you have niche ideas, the next step to find niche markets with twitter, is to get a targeted twitter following.
If you follow someone, many times they will follow you back. As you start to get followers, you will begin to see their twitter conversations.
Sign up for a twitter account and start following people. If you have a particular interest you are researching, concentrate on getting followers who share your interest.
For example, let's say that you are interested in something having to do with horses. Develop your following with people who are also interested in horses.
- Go to search.twitter.com and put in your key word "horses" and find out who is having a conversation about horses. If their profiles seem interesting, follow them.
- Look for people who really promote their interest in horses, and check out who is following them. Follow their follower-ers.
- Go to "find people" on twitter, and put in your key word "horses". Find people with horses in their twitter name.
- Use Google to find businesses that sell supplies or services to your niche market and see if they have a twitter account. For example, google "horse supplies" and find horse gear stores. If any have a twitter account, follow them and then follow their follower-ers.
- Go to Google Blogsearch and search with your keyword for blogs. Find ones that twitter and follow them.
Step 3. To continue researching how to find niche markets with twitter, you become zen. The next step is watching.
At least once/day and more if you can, check into your twitter account and see what people are talking about. Follow conversations.
- Keep your eyes open for gaps, difficulties, problems. Watch for things that people need and can't find. Do they need a special tool to care for their horses.
- Watch for questions people ask. What are their concerns? What information do they most request?
In our example, let's say that people really worry about their horse's hooves. If there is a lot of discussion about that, this is a place for you to start to find a niche.
Step 4: Take the information about niche markets you have learned in twitter and use other niche market tools to confirm your hunch.
In our example, just because people talk about horse hooves in twitter, does not mean that this would work for your business. Use the free Google Keyword research tool to find out if your niche has good keywords. Make sure that you have a good way to monetize your idea.
And be sure to keep watching the twitter conversations about your niche market to really get to know your customers.
Twitter is like listening in on the conversations of hundreds of people.
Finding a niche market with twitter is exciting because twitter is very current and gives us a "fly on the wall" vantage on what people are saying. If you watch and listen, you will learn about your customers and their needs and desires.
With so much information about so many people, it's easy to see how to find niche markets with twitter.
You've Got Niche Followerers, Now What?
Now that you have twitter followers who are interested in your niche, now what do you do? What do you talk about? How do you engage them?
While twitter isn't hard to do, learning how to use twitter effectively can be challenging.
First you must get a sense of the social etiquette on twitter. What is considered polite? How do you start a conversation? What annoys twitter users?
And after you learn the social rules, you must learn how to integrate it into your business plan.
Twitter can be a fun way to find leads. I invite you to contact me if you want more information about engaging your prospects through twitter.
CommentsLoading...
Thanks Marisa. I hope you find it useful.
Julia
Great article! I will definitely use this info! Thanks!
Victoria
Thanks for the feedback, Victoria. I hope it is helpful.
Julia
Thanks for some great info! There are so many out there telling how to set up a niche set, but they really do not give any good advice on finding your niche.
Looks like I found my niche HERE!!! A bunch of intelligent, witty and good-looking ladies.......and I have you ALL to myself (lol). Seriously Julia, I like this. Just finished the "writing with pull" tutorials and see that you've applied a lot of what Mike taught. Thanks.
BTW - Are the men afraid to come here?
Really good info here - thanks Julia. I'll be using this info.
Terrific Stuff, Julia! You gave me something to test out. (I'm still stuck on my niche being "people who's toenails don't grow evenly:))
Kevin
Thanks Julia. Being relatively new to Twitter, I appreciate the tips.
Sandy
I agree that twitter is a great information and communication portal, for marketers and bloggers.
Thanks for sharing this info. I'm still very new to Twitter ans was trying to figure out how to really use it to my benefit...I'm always in search of new niches. Thanks again.
Thank you all, for your kind comments. I hope that you find this infomation helpful.
Be sure to check out the link to the "15 Ways to Track Twitter Trends". It is a great list of resources and may help you get ideas about emerging niche trends.
Niches start with what people talk about...
Julia
Julia, I got on twitter then prettymuch just sat there looking at it, could not make any sense out of the whole thing. Thanks for some valuable info. You present your advise in a very clear fashion.
Very good marketing information. I've bookmarked this for future reference!
Thumbs up!
Hi Dolores,
Twitter is a funny medium. Think of it as a big, loud party with everyone talking at once. You can listen into anyone's conversation.
The difference between twitter and a party, besides the 140 character thing, is that in a party, you only hear the conversations near you. If you want to research the beach sandal market, and you happen to be standing near people who love to ski, you're out of luck. The beach bums may be on the other side of the room, but you'll never hear them talking.
With twitter, you can listen in and find all the conversations about the beach. Watch the posts scroll by and jump in when someone says something interesting. Or strike up a conversation yourself. Post something that beach people will find useful. The other beach people will be trolling twitter for beach tweets, so they will be looking for you too.
Eventually, you will find some beach people and some of them are bound to want sandals. Watch their conversations for their needs and wants. Poll them if you have questions. Offer advice. If you turn out to be a good "twitter friend" to them, they may click on your link and find your beach sandal website.
It has taken a while for me to "get" twitter. How do you talk in 140 characters without sounding like a billboard or a dork? It's an art.
But twitter does hold some really interesting marketing research possibilities.
I hope this helps. Feel free to post questions.
Julia
nice article!
Great info Julia, seem to be a lot of new sites opening on the back of twitter. Like it though brings about new opportunities.
Thanks for posting this hub.
thanks to the tip about hashtags, very useful thank you.
Excellent article Julia! This fits in perfectly with Class 4 of Renegade Breakthrough.
GOod ideas here! You can expand tis concept using any number of other Twitter tools available out there today, too, even combining this with Facebook :)
Good Hub Julia,Twollow.com is also good for finding people in you niche.
Also the directory on Tweetdeck is good.
Dear AndrewCollinson,
You're right--the Tweetdeck directory is a good way to find people in your niche.
Some readers may not know what Tweetdeck is.
Tweetdeck is a software program that you download to your computer and you use it to do your tweeting. Tweetdeck has a lot more functions than just using the Twitter site. You can filter your followers and view them separately. You can have multiple columns of Tweets, divided by your own searches and filters. Tweetdeck can automatically shorten your URL's for you and it even has a function to help you shorten your Tweets when you're too long winded. It also easily links with other programs like Facebook and My Space.
AndrewCollinson was suggesting finding people who share your interests with the Tweetdeck directory. The directory is on the Tweetdeck website. The directory has lists of big-name tweeters arranged by subject. So for example, you can click on "business and marketing" and get a list of big name tweeters in business. Click a button, and this list will be added to your Tweetdeck.
After that, the next time you check your tweetdeck, you will be able to see what is going on in your subject (and use their followers to get followers who want to follow you.
Thanks AndrewCollinson!
Julia
Dear Andrew,
Thank you for your suggestion as well.
Twollow.com is one of several sites that offer ways to automatically follow people on Twitter. You input some keywords you're looking for, and Twollow will look for those keywords and automatically follow them.
One word about autofollow sites--I have tried 2 different sites. I only used them a little bit, but my results were mixed. Yes, I did follow a lot of people and some of them followed me back. But for some reason, I felt that I got more follow-backs when I was hand picking my follows. It's a lot a work, but it seemed to work better for me.
There is really no explanation about why I would have this experience. When I follow people by hand, I click on their profile and look for a few qualities that make me want to follow them--interesting posts, no spam, etc. Perhaps the autofollow feature makes your following list more suspectible to people who spam or send out automatic tweets. If I had hand picked them, I wouldn't have followed them.
But in general, I would think that using Twollow would give the same results as hand searching Twitter. For some reason, it didn't work well for me.
Thank for your idea, Andrew.
What is everyone else's experience with Twollow?
Julia
Hi Julia, twitter is fun but I seldom at twitter nowadays because I find it too spammy and people are using software to auto tweet, auto send message, auto reply, all AUTO.. Of course there are still people who are using twitter to connect with each others and get leads there. Just that I find that difficult to get quality leads. How about you and what is your opinion?
Dear Moonloh,
I have a love/hate relationship with twitter. You are absolutely right--it is often very spammy and with all the automation, it loses its human touch.
And yet...
Twitter is a very powerful marketing tool. Many businesses use it very successfully.
I haven't fully developed this theory because I see examples of success on both sides but I'm beginning to wonder if Twitter is better at building a relationship with existing clients than finding leads. Most of the spammy tweets are from people fishing for leads. Many of the great success stories are with businesses using twitter in various ways to serve their customers.
What's your opinion? What is the experience of anyone else out there?
Thank you for your comment.
Julia
I start to use a new twitter auto follow service on the net http://www.fastautofollow.com/, found that is great, I need not to do any manual works, my twitter followers increased automatically everyday.It works real people I am following and who are following back, a 5 star product that I recommend to anyone!
LOVE NICHE HELP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I'm a Fan! We should talk ;)
great information thanks!
Marisa Herrera D 3 years ago
Excellent article, Julia. You give very useful information, which I will apply myself.
Thanks!
Marisa Herrera (fellow RBMP intern)