There’s been a recent upsurge in brands joining the Twitter community in hopes to find a way to connect with their consumers. Their goal is to enter the “broadcast state”, a point where the company is reaching out to repeaters and influencers. Reaching this goal is no easy task, with finding influencers the most difficult part.
There is, however, a method to make this routine easier. With a little Yahoo! magic, we can discover Twitter users that enjoy our product and have already mentioned it in the past.
Firstly, it’s important to understand that this strategy does no more than find influencers in your niche. Once we identify them, we’re able to follow them. The simple act of following them may be enough to inform them that your brand’s Twitter account exists and is active. You can take it a step further and reach out to them via DM if they follow you back.
So to start finding Twitter users in you niche, we’ll be using the Yahoo search engine. Specifically we’ll be using the “linkdomain:” query to find inbound links to the brand website. We’ll add the term “+twitter” to filter out inbound links from pages that mention the term “twitter”.
The philosophy behind this is that if a website owner or blogger is linking to us, they have a positive bias towards the brand. Secondly, if they are mentioning Twitter, they most likely have a Twitter account. Obviously, these are two relatively large assumptions, and will require manual filtering of the search results.
In the end your search query should look similar to this:
Like I said before, this is a very rough idea of the Twitter users in your niche that have a positive idea of the brand. If you have a technology blog and wrote about Twitter, every article about Twitter linking to you would be returned in the query. This method only gives you an idea of where to start, and is in no way an automated process.
Once you’ve begun building your Twitter fanbase, your work isn’t done. Maintaining and continually identifying influencers in your niche is important. Using a query with your brand name and “+twitter” in Google alerts, creates a real-time RSS feed of potential Twitter users mentioning your brand.
As well as using Google alerts, it’s a good idea to track mentions in Twitter itself. With TweetDeck, you’re able to create custom “Search Alerts”. This puts all mentions of they keywords you choose into a separate pane, giving you real-time tracking of specific terms relevant to your niche.
These three techniques should give you a starting point for your new Twitter account, and a way to continually identify new influences. Don’t forget, though, finding Twitter users and getting them to give you a chance is just the beginning. The next step is offering value to them and retaining them as followers.
For the future:
The above strategy is very minimal: it gives basic information and requires a lot of manual editing. To make it even better, there should be a tool that automatically checks links for a Twitter account and then parses how many followers and how many updates that user has.
Samir Balwani is a Social Media Strategist working with companies to effectively use the Internet. You can get more of his thoughts at Left The Box.
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