Twitter is used for millions of different reasons. Maybe you’re a crazy cat lady (like my boss) and love sharing photos of cute, fuzzy kittens. Maybe you’re addicted to new technology and need to be first to hear news about big changes in the mobile industry (like me). Or maybe you just use Twitter to throw your thoughts out there — what you want to eat, drink, do, buy, etc. Twitter is an easy way to share and find just about anything.

People send 500 million Tweets per day (Twitter). That’s a lot of info. In other words, for local businesses, that’s a lot of potential sales. We built Twitter lead lead searches to help local businesses be proactive on social media. Start by making use of Twitter lead searches in Social Marketing to find exactly what you want: more customers.

Creating lead searches is more of an art than a science. Sometimes your searches need to be straight-forward, but other times you need to be the da Vinci of lead searches. Just kidding, it’s definitely easier than that. Here are some suggestions to become a lead search master:

Put yourself in your prospect’s Twitter shoes

This is the number one thing: be human. Don’t be lame. Don’t search for jargon. What would you say when you, as a customer, would want to express interest in your business’ service category? Try different combinations of keywords and phrases. Continuously check their results by clicking “Preview” before you save the search.

Do some weeding

Throughout your endeavors, you will stumble across irrelevant results. Determine what words are clogging up your feed and then type those words into the “Must Not Include” field to get rid of irrelevant results. No one has created the perfect lead search without some fine tuning.

Use geolocation to your advantage

If you’re a local business, search for local tweets. After all, people are not going to travel across the States to eat dinner at your gastropub. The “Near This Address” field will automatically be filled with your business’ address. Simply leave it as it is! Then, choose a radius that suits your business. For example, customers might travel further for a car dealership than they would for a fast food joint.

If you’re not so local, delete the the “Near This Address” text to search everywhere. This is primarily useful for online companies.

Try being simple (we all love easy wins)

Sometimes, simple is best. Try setting up “I want” and “I need” as keywords (in the same search, but different fields), and then specify a “Must Include” keyword like taco, beer, haircut, car, etc. Trust me, people say these things on Twitter all the time. Yay for easy wins!

You can add up to five lead searches. Just keep trying different things, keep sculpting your results, and within minutes, you’ll be a lead search artist. You’ll know you got it right when you start getting excited because you’ve just discovered tons of new opportunities. And you will continue to do so.