By not analysing your Twitter followers, you're missing out on huge amounts of data that could help you to scale your business.
If you have a Twitter account, you’re sure to keep an eye on those little black numbers on your profile…
A higher number of Twitter followers means more opportunities to spread awareness of your ideas or your brand. It means that your campaigns and your website can reach more people. It also proves that people are interested in your content and signals to others to follow you. In this way, a Twitter following can grow exponentially, establishing you/your brand as a thought leader in your industry.
However, for many people, analysing their Twitter followers stops with tracking the numbers… and this is a mistake. There are a number of angles through which you can analyse your Twitter following in order to get better results on the platform; in this article, we run through how- and why- you need to be considering these data points.
Let’s get started…
Though often unconsidered, your existing Twitter audience holds the key to growing your follower base. Beyond understanding demographics, by analysing their interests, you can attract people exactly like them. This is crucial in a business marketing context, in which you are looking to scale your business through something akin to lookalike audiences.
By producing content that your existing audience is looking for, you can improve your engagement- both directly with them and indirectly through retweets which push your profile out to a wider audience.
You can also maximise the impact you have on your existing audience through understanding when and how they use Twitter… After all, there’s no point having a huge following if they don’t even see your content. This will reflect just as badly on your page as not having many followers.
An important step in analysing your Twitter audience is learning what content they like to engage with; there are a few ways to do this.
The first is to manually scroll through each of your followers’ timelines. This will give you a quick idea of what kind of content is popular, but you’ll of course be unable to replicate this process with a large number of accounts without spending a significant amount of time.
Twitter once offered high level audience interest insights for free. However, with the increase of Twitter ads, you can now only see the interests of your audience when you publish a campaign. If you’re looking to take a paid advertising approach on Twitter, this is an option.
However, the third (and undoubtedly best) way to discover your audience’s interests is to use a tool that pulls all the right data from their profiles in just seconds. Social Opinion’s follower intelligence dashboard shows you the products, organisations and people that your audience frequently discusses.
This not only gives you ideas for content, but benchmarks to compare your content to. Explore the organisations that your audience likes to gain ideas about the way they like to be spoken to on social media. Take a look at the people they follow to understand the types of ideas they are engaging with and to gain further audience persona insights. Understand which products they discuss to uncover the potential problems they may be experiencing and solutions they may be looking at.
It’s important to incorporate research about your existing audience’s hashtag use into your hashtag strategy.
If you’re thinking, “what’s a hashtag strategy?” don’t worry. Many users struggle to know how to best use hashtags, especially when first starting out on Twitter. However, they are important! Research shows that tweets with hashtags get 2x more engagement on average.
The easiest way to think about your hashtag strategy is to think of hashtags as keywords in your tweets that make it easy for the relevant people to find you… The more specific the keywords that you find in your current audience’s use, the more likely that you’ll be able to tap into a wider interested audience. In part this is because, while popular hashtags you will find on the Twitter homepage can get easily overwhelmed, with specific hashtags, your content won’t get drowned out.
With the Social Opinion social listening tool, you can find the hashtags that have an existing buzz around them.
On a site as globally connected as Twitter, one of the most important ways to analyse your audience is through activity insights. Without doing this, you risk your tweets getting lost as the average tweet lifespan is just 18 minutes!
By understanding exactly when your audience is online, as Social Opinion allows you to do, you can target your content to hit these moments. Simply look at the dashboard to see how many people are typically online during which periods of time.
Social Opinion’s tweet scheduler then allows you to fill these slots automatically while our autoretweet feature goes one step further to ensure that no spots are missed. Through this, you can bulk create evergreen content that your audience would be interested in and queue it to go out so that you never miss an opportunity to connect.
Making the most out of Twitter need not take you a large amount of time. It just requires careful strategy around how you use audience data to inform the content you put out.
To get started with Social Opinion, click the link to learn more.
