Have you ever wondered what your local community was talking about on Twitter? Sure it’s great to have conversations with people around the world, but sometimes you want to know what’s going on next door. Well today I’m going to show you how you can do just that and how you can use those results for your church.
Now how can you make this happen? We can do this with a location based Twitter search. Don’t worry it’s not that difficult. Just follow these directions and you’re on your way.
(Now before I go any further, I first need to give credit to the awesome Noah Sidhom at Bellevue Baptist for some of these ideas.)
Find Your GPS Location
First, we need to find your church’s geocode. Head over to geocoder.us. Once you are there, enter in your church’s physical address in the search bar.
Next, hit search and the site will return the longitude and latitude of your location. This is the geocode and what we will use to search your location. Your results should look something like this:
Don’t worry if the results aren’t an exact match for your address (mine weren’t), just long as the results are close enough to your location. Now the two numbers you’ll want are located at the top of the results. My numbers were 36.001461 and -86.8184. You’ll need these two numbers for our next step.
Start Searching in Hootesuite
Now let’s compose a search in Hootsuite using the geocode we just obtained. Go to Hootesuite and and click “Add Stream”. You should see a new window pop up. On that window click the menu option entitled “Search”. This is where we’ll enter our geocode and search term. Now you’ll need to compose your geocode and search term to look like this “search term, geocode:(your geocode),distance(in km)”. Your search query should look something like this:
Now click “Add Stream” and should see a new stream appear in Hootesuite with your search results!
What You Can Do with Location Based Searches
I promise you once you start using this type of search, you’ll be surprised what can find. You can run keyword searches for Twitter users who are:
- Looking for church home
- Seeking prayer
- Asking theological questions
- Just moved to your area
You’re really limited to what keyword combinations you can come up with. In fact you’ll probably want to try different variations in order to find what you are looking for. Once you understand how to use location based searches the possibilities are endless.
Question: Have you tried this did it work, what kind of reactions did you get? Click here to share below.