Building a Twitter Following with Follower Wonk

Building a Twitter following takes time and a certain amount of determination. Whilst some companies stick to tried and tested solutions, others are attempting to take shortcuts by buying followers, something that is a great danger to the reputation of a brand.

Many businesses need to target a specific audience, perhaps to connect with others in their particular niche, especially for B2B. This can be time consuming and a little soul destroying to carry out manually, and that is why it’s a good idea to use a good tool.

However, this is the internet and not all tools are created equally, so it’s necessary to conduct a little research before taking the plunge.

Enter Follower Wonk

Follower Wonk is a tried, tested and most important trusted tool for Twitter which can really help a business to pin down their target audience, how to get to them, their influencer scores and much more.

There are two ways to use Follower Wonk, either for free or by paying a subscription fee for Pro. First let’s have a look at the free features.

• Search Twitter bios fairly obviously allows you to search the biographies of other users in order to find people you want to target.
• Compare Twitter Users is a nifty little function that allows you to see how many followers users have, how often they post, the average number of followers they pick up in a day and how long they have been using Twitter. This is ideal for comparing a company against its competitors so that you can boost your efforts. It also gives you a social authority score for each user so that you can add or target the most influential users.
• Analyse followers is an analytics tool which allows you to see social influencers and how many a user is following, where their followers are located in the world and gives a breakdown on their followers. This is a very useful tool for finding the right audience.

Whilst these are invaluable tools which will get any business off the ground when starting with Twitter, the subscription version of Follower Wonk is even better. As well as the features listed above, the Pro version has much more functionality, such as the ability to track and sort followers, generating actionable reports for further analysis.

Definitive social media insights

Whilst Google Analytics has a social dashboard section which can be relatively helpful, it’s not designed for social and so can’t do even a fraction of what Follower Wonk can.

Like any business practice, it’s wise to work out a strategy before starting to use Follower Wonk, so that you can really get the best out of it.

When planning, consider how the following may affect your business.

• Influence scores are based on retweets and those with a high level of retweets are social influencers. This means that if you were to target those people with a high social authority successfully, you’re more likely to gain a follower who will gain you a lot of retweets.

Scores include three main components:

1. The retweet rate of the users last non-@mention tweets
2. Favours recent activity
3. Looks at other data in order to arrive at the score by counting followers

Those users who haven’t tweeted lately will have a low social influence and the metrics include a regression model that accounts for the scarcity of retweets. By targeting social influencers, you are much more likely to get retweets if you consider that at 10,000 followers, you will only get around 25% in retweets.

By analysing users, it’s also possible to find your audience more easily and effectively.

To find this, carry out a search on followers who are influential and tend to engage with you, or are more likely to. Then it’s just a question of sorting the results by influence and hovering over each to find how much engagement they take part in.

These are then people that you can target to help your own campaign. Retweet their tweets, message them and reply to their tweets to help them to notice yours. Note here that content should be of a very high standard or you are likely to do your company more harm than good.

When looking at engagement, think about how much they interact with others and how they do. Then you can interact with them in a similar way, in order to get their attention and get them to engage.

Great for local businesses too

The ability to see where in the world another’s followers are located is important to local business. It can be quite difficult to find this information out from just a bio and even then, it’s not as good as the ability to view a world map.

Local businesses should of course have their followers concentrated in a certain part of the world in order to reach them effectively and Follower Wonk allows them to do so. It’s possible to search bios to discover location, find influencers in your area and ensure that your following is local and engaged.

All of this and more can be carried out using Follower Wonk, which is one of the most useful Twitter tools we’ve seen to date. For the small business, the free option is extremely useful, it’s not always necessary to pay subscription fees, but if you can afford it, it certainly seems worth it.

Follower Wonk can be obtained on a 30-day free trial, so you can always try before you buy.