Often times, you need to discover the right combination of tools in your toolbox to have the internet work for you. In regards to twitter, you can pull more data than you've ever wanted - and easier than ever. I wanted to share some information that I've managed to make use of for a variety of projects, that turned out to be rather helpful.

Through the years, I've wanted to accomplish a few simple things:

• Find users on twitter (wherever) on scale, who have websites, and sort by some type of category or topic.
• Pull this into a spreadsheet, and sort by lots of metrics (klout, da, pa, etc.) to prioritize them.
• Keep track one way or another of all these folks and start building worthwhile relationships.

And, to my surprise, it's actually easier than ever.

There are hundreds of tools, often times overlapping each other in what they accomplish. I'll outline a few methods to accomplish some steps here, to give you the ability to chose however you want to use it based on your needs. Using these strategies, you can start modifying it a thousand ways and I'm sure you clever SEOs can use this strategy to your advantage ;).

Gather the audience

The first thing I did here to identify the audience I wanted to capture, is simply find all the folks who use the same hashtag, and hopefully:

1. Likes to enter contests, mention brands, engage with brands (or person).
2. Engages in social media, in more than one way. Facebook/G+.
3. Has a website.

The best way one could accomplish this is use a free tool called The Archivist, which you download and allows you to easily search on twitter and export the data quickly into excel. This is what you'll get after using it.

If you are not using a PC, and/or don't want to download programs here is an alternative way to get all the twitter users:

1) Visit http://archivist.visitmix.com/ (web based version)
2) Search for the #hashtag you want to get data for.
3) Highlight the twitter username, select "Scrape Similar" using the Scrape tool and in the XPATH location input: //div/div/div[@class='username']

And....This is what I get:

If you need more help, or are a little lost, here is an amazing article from Justin Briggs on more ways to use the "Scrape Similar" tool.

Some alternative tips to accomplish very similar things:

(TIP 1: FollowerWonk allows you to export searches by twitter bios, however it's paid.)

(TIP 2: If this is something you want to do one-time you can use RowFeeder, which pulls all the URLs for a hashtag and puts it into a GoogleDoc. RowFeeder is paid after one-term, and I prefer to just do this my way.)

Sort the Audience

If you're feeling really excited you can take your long column of twitter usernames and pull in their Klout score right away. To do this quickly with XPathOnURL using Niels Bosma SEO Tools for Excel all you need to do is:

=XPathOnUrl("http://api.klout.com/1/klout.xml?users="&A2&"&key=[your_api_key]", "//users/user/kscore")

Though this is great, and helpful and we can use VLOOKUP later to pull all this data in - what I really want from this though, is the website that these people have. (If you need help with excel and how it works with Excel, you'll need to read the excel guide from Distilled.)

Do they have a URL??

Again using Niels tool I can find this out:

=XPathOnUrl("http://twitter.com/USERNAME/","//div[@class='url']")

After a quick manual scrub (sort by A-Z, keep the http://, remove the Facebooks/LinkedIns, remove the garbage), you have hundreds URLs, that are worth playing with.

(TIP 3: For help with XPathOnURL or other awesomeness check out this article, from Richard Baxter at SEOGadget.)

Prioritizing the Audience

I use a quick excel sheet from BusinessHut.com that I modified to include more of Niels metrics (=FacebookLikes, =GooglePlusCount), and Klout Score you get this:

You can make this list as long as you want and sort by whatever metrics matter most to you. I'm sure this will give everybody enough information to get started and have a little fun with some data.

Outreach & Management

Now that you've got the URLs and contacts, prioritized by vertical/niche, you can start doing some neat stuff with it. You can grow it, sort it, tag it, and figure out who you'd like to engage with and who you don't. You can easily extract the contact information for organizational purposes for all the URLs by inputting them into Citation Lab's Contact Finder or by using a nifty toolset from Buzzstream.

Lastly, use this as a weapon in your toolbelt to grow your community, engage with your audience, and build new high-quality relationships.

There are hundreds of articles on doing outreach correctly, so instead of re-invent the wheel:

• Outreach for Linkbuilding | Whiteboard Friday (Tom Critchlow)
• 4 Tips On Improving Your Blogger Outreach Message (Seer Interactive)
• A 12-stage Hustle Process for Link Building