How to monitor specific twitter topics but only for large twitter users/brands

[Somfy]

My objective is to be able to easily catch when top brands/athletes/celebrities tweets about a specific topic like "interior design" so we can then reply to their tweet. The purpose is not to gain the attention of that brand but to be visible to their followers. I know I can just follow a hash tag like "#interiorDesign" however I want to weed out all the basic twitter users and only go after the big ones.

Anyone have an idea how to accomplish this?

[WhoWuddaThunk]

In the search box you will also want to search for the people you are targeting.  There isn't a universal search for people with 1 million followers, but you can use twitter search operatives to filter a lot.  There's some listed lower down on this page: http://mashable.com/2009/09/04/twitter-advanced-search/

[DonnaDuncan]

Buzzsumo might be able to help with that too. How helpful it turns out to be will depend on how specific your search topic is.

Buzzsumo will allow you to enter in a search topic or domain, filter by publication type (article, infographic, guest post and so on), and then sort by the number of twitter shares. Because you're looking to identify top brand/athlete/celebrity shares, and because they tend to have a boat-load of followers, they're likely going to rise to the top after your sort. Eyeball the results and and see if any pop out.