By Michael Dorausch, D.C.
It’s no secret that I love Twitter. You can follow my personal tweets @chiropractic or you may want to follow chiropractic news tweets @planetc1 or (if you are a chiropractor) even localized chiropractic classified advertising @ChiropracticAds.
Earlier today, Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land authored a post about a recently added local twitter search option by a company called Summize. I had been playing with some of the search features of the site but after Danny’s post I thought I’d do an experiment to see what kind of localized results were potentially available.
A straight search for my user profile brings up a number of tweets by me, conversations I’m having with others, and some other tweets related to chiropractic. That doesn’t provide any location information so I asked a group of those following me to tweet back their location. Now I had some results to play with.
Two users from Dallas, Texas responded to my tweet, eddings and tonynwright. Notice the tweets read @chiropractic Dallas, Texas and @chiropractic Dallas, TX ? While these results are appearing on summize, I wonder if there’s a potential they’ll be indexed by a major search engine? Let’s take a look at some more.
tighefighter messaged back Calgary, AB (which is in Canada)
Interestingly, jonkelly twittered back denver, co and daniellew messaged back New Paltz, NY and neither one of their tweets appeared in the local search results for their cities. I had to perform a nonadvanced search (chiropractic New Paltz, NY or chiropractic denver, co) to return their results.
The person in the middle, devbasu twittered Toronto, Ontario and that result came back in a location based search. The search query looked like this… chiropractic near:”Toronto, Ontario” within:15mi
Here’s a screenshot from my twitter profile of six more replies I had…
Search string for chiropractic near:”Honolulu, Hawaii” within:15mi returned results for twitter user techustle. Search string for chiropractic near:”Raleigh, NC” didn’t return my tweet from torka. There was no local search results for pattib22 @chiropractic Naples Florida but the davidmihm @chiropractic Portland, OR came up positive for location based search.
The tweet by Keri Morgret (who had a good post today Apology to my Wrists) didn’t return search results either. In this particular case, it could be that they are protected (hope you are ok with me sharing that information Keri). And finally, chiropractic near:”Charleston, WV” returned results with the twitter profile of rustyfelty (who I am now following).
So what did I learn from all this (other than there are lots of super people following me) experimenting? I learned that Summize is on their way to organizing some localized Twitter data. I also learned that current searches are currently based on location information added to user profiles and not information sent in tweets (someone correct me if I am wrong).
There has got to be some potential here but I don’t quite see it yet. What do you think?
2 Comments
Michael, really interesting stuff. I saw that story on Summize on SEL & thought there was probably GREAT potential for small businesses who are geo-focused but I am still so new to Twitter I haven’t entirely wrapped my head around the possibilities. Anyway, thanks for your research & this post.
dm
Thanks David. I continued testing and followers helped out by providing some zip codes. have a few ideas I’ll address in a future post.
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