Okley dokely...
Okay, everyone is important. We know that.
It’s just sometimes we want to find the movers and shakers on places like Twitter, in hopes of getting our writing or artwork or whatever on their radar by following them and hoping for the pretty good #followback that people sometimes tend to do, which puts our work in front of their faces in the form of future and former tweets that they read.
And Twitter has some cool tools that can help you try and narrow down who these influential folk may be.
Search for the high-priced zip codes…
For example, I just checked out the most expensive zip codes in America, and popped one of them (11962, “better known as Sagaponack, N.Y., [wherein] the most expensive property currently for sale is listed at $30 million”) into Twitter’s “refine results” advanced search results page as such:
Finding the monied crowd...
To get to this advanced search page, I just went to my home page of Twitter, typed anything in the search field — then clicked “
refine results” and cleared out whatever search term I’d put in there.
Next I scrolled down to the bottom and in the “near this place” field, I typed in the zip code in question, and chose only “1 mile” within this distance so I could get that expensive neighborhood only.
It also works if you pop in a city and state, like “Bel Air, CA” or whatever, but that doesn’t mean you’ll always get what you think.
Oh yes...
In this instance, it was cool, because I found Jeremy Gordon (Twitter handle @JeremyCasts) whose profile lists him as a “Los Angeles Casting Director/Producer reaching out to the world!”
Turns out he seems legit, and according to IMDB, was even responsible for casting that new “Think Like a Man” Steve Harvey movie. (Don’t ask me why he’s popping up under the Sagaponack, New York, pricey zip code on Twitter. Perhaps he’s bicoastal.)
When I’m in my “reporter” mode writing Google News stories, I like using that “near this place” option on Twitter to cull the people who are really potentially nearby a certain event, and aren’t just retweeting or writing about it. I’ve done that to find people in Chicago who were privy to Oprah stuff more than others — or to try and find students from Virginia Tech actually tweeting about hiding out when the shooting was happening, instead of those from farther away.
Find more big wigs on Twitter…
Of course, another way to do this would’ve been to find a person’s name on IMDB or in the news or wherever and then search for them on Twitter, if they have an account.
If you are what you say you are...a superstar...
Or use Twitter’s basic “
Who to follow” link and
type positions like producer or
casting director or
literary agent or whatever you’re into in the search box — then weed out the ones that seem like scheisters.
I guess that’s why I like to use the expensive zip code or city field in conjunction with the position/title search, because that seems to narrow down or add an extra measure of verification. And you perhaps may find someone influential who doesn’t have a ton of followers nor a verified account that actually follows you back and falls in love with your stuff and simply must pass it on to his cohorts.
Now @JeremyCasts, about this idea for a TV series that would be right up the alley of @IamSteveHarvey…
