Finding local Twitter users in your city or location can be very useful at times, you can connect with them to get valuable information. It’s also a great social networking move to build relationships with like minded people who are close to your geographical location.

One of the advantage of strong networking in Twitter is the speed with which you receive information. If you have good contacts and friends in your city, you can ask questions and get information more quickly. Another aspect is the authenticity of information, after all a human mouth can be a lifesaver when Google fails.

Here are some really useful web tools which lets you find Twitter users from a specific location, know what they are doing and connect with them:

Advanced Twitter Search

The Advanced Twitter search is still one of the best ways to find Twitter users in any city or geographical location. Just type in the name of the city, state or country and Twitter search will show you the recent tweets coming from that location.

The neat thing about Advanced Twitter search is that you can customize the results and find Tweets that contain a specific keyword or hashtag. You can also define the time period of the tweets to be filtered, this is useful when you want to know the tweets that are coming from a specific city within a defined time interval.

For example: If you are looking for “Chinese restaurants” near Kolkata and want to know what Twitter users from Kolkata are saying about the word “restaurants”, perform this search and the results will be shown as under:

Find Tweetups in a city: The advanced Twitter search can also be used to find tweetups in a city. Search for the word “tweetup”, mention the name of the city and you are done. See example

There are many more parameters which you can customize – this includes defining the distance of the location, excluding or including specific words or phrases (this reduces spammy tweets), tweets from a particular profile, tweets containing links and more. The results are based on the profile bio’s of twitter users and thus it’s highly accurate.

LocalTweeps – Find Local Tweets

Localtweeps in another service which uses a hashtag to list Twitter users from a city. You can add your Twitter profile to the Localtweeps website by registering your city’s name and zip code. When you use the hashtag “#lt”, your tweet is made searchable in the Localtweeps directory.

Hence if you have anything important to share with other twitter users living in the same city, simply use #lt hashtag and wait for the reactions to flood in. I found the service very engaging, because you can easily follow twitter users from a specific city and join the conversation, ask questions and so on.

The site also has a long list of Top twitter users from Top cities, this feature may be used to know the trends and popular events of a specific geographic location.

Desktop App to Gather Location Based Tweets

Need a desktop application to keep an eye on location based Tweets? Enter Twitterlocal – a unique Twitter client built using Adobe AIR which helps you to track location based tweets from your desktop. All you have to do is enter the location and the radius you wish to track, the application will create a real time lifestream of tweets from the specific location.

Newer tweets are shown as they appear, you can click through a link or Twitter profile and start the conversation.

Nearby Tweets

This one is my favorite, because Nearby Tweets automatically determines which city you are from and then loads the recent tweets of users from the same city. You can use the map to change your location to any other part of the world, add your own keywords and perform a fresh search to know the recent updates about a particular subject.

The search interface is simple and clutter free and the results are shown really fast. Highly recommended.

Find Local Twitter Trends With Mapmash

Mapmash is another neat service which can be used to know the local twitter trends of any city. The idea is very simple yet unique – the app displays the currently popular twitter topics and hashtags that are revolving around a particular city. You can browse the world map in the Mapmash website and hover over a city to find the active topics and discussions. Clicking a hashtag loads the recent tweets in the sidebar.

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