Who Are Your Twitter Followers? How Do You Compare?

We aren’t on Twitter all day. If we were, we’d never get anything done. It’s easy to get pulled into many conversations and spend hours there. Aside from Twitter chats and the occasional reply, we schedule our tweets throughout the day rather than responding live. This spreads out our presence and helps us avoid dominating the Twitter stream. We create every reply, retweet, and original tweet.

To help improve our Twitter experience, we check out Followerwonk from Moz. The tool can help you find people to follow, identify the best times to tweet, and tell you about your followers and follows. And it includes lots of great visuals for easier data analysis.

Find influencers to follow

Enter industry-related keywords of people you want to follow in the search tool. To find influencers to follow, sort the results by social authority. You can improve your chances of starting a conversation with an influencer by shooting for those who fall somewhere in the middle.

Those with high social authority get deluged with direct tweets. Those with low social authority won’t be heard. Thus go for Goldilocks’ favorite of just right. This would be the people between 20 and 50. Review the tweets from people who are often retweeted to see what kind of content grabs people interested in your industry.

Another way to find people to follow is to look at your direct or indirect competitors to see what followers they have in common. Any overlaps is a sign the follower is interested in your type of business. Unfortunately, this approach won’t work for all businesses as it depends on whether your competitors are active. A lot of times, it’s other competitors who follow your competitors.

You can also study the followers of publications, writers, and evangelists. Look closer at the ones who appear in the overlaps with a social authority of at least 20. Since our software syncs Outlook with phones and tablets, we compared three smartphone-related companies. Just 22 people follow all three. Easy peasy.

This Venn diagram comparing followers proves helpful as we aren’t about to follow 1,000 people.

This list contains names, number of tweets, following and follower numbers, account age, and social authority. We check out the interesting ones and follow those who interest us.

Beware that Followerwonk showed the default egg avatar for one of the accounts. The account actually has an original avatar. What we find curious is that one account with thousands of followers and an authority of 30 has an automated Twitter stream with the same message. We wouldn’t follow them directly without checking them out first.

When are the best times to tweet?

We could read all the articles about the best times to tweet. But the answer is different for every user. Those articles can offer a guidance, a starting point. We experiment with different times to find the most effective times. Followerwonk can help here.

It does a good job of identifying the best times to tweet. The tool analyzes the people a user follows and the people who follow the user. According to Followerwonk data, our followers are most active during lunchtime. And, as luck would have it, the people we follow are also most active around that time too.

What if the two charts were different? Which one should you use to determine when to tweet? That’s a tough call. You follow people you want to engage. But if they’re not following you back, they’re not likely to see your tweets. The people who follow you have a better chance of hearing from you and responding. The downside is that they may not be your target audience.

Fortunately, we don’t have that problem. Still, if we had to choose, we’d go with the times the people who follow us are most active. We’d rather reach people who want to hear from us and hope they retweet or reply. Then, maybe we’ll reach prospects through their tweets.

If you use Buffer, Followerwonk can automatically adjust your posting times to pick the most active times to post. Enter how many times a day you tweet and Followerwonk posts a schedule with that number.

However, check the schedule after Followerwonk does its magic. It has a tendency to add all seven days of the week when we only tweet on weekdays. It also doubled the schedule that had us tweeting our own schedule AND Followerwonk’s.

How effective is it? Well, we’ve tried it a few times and had colleagues test it. Some report more engagement, others saw no change. Our best suggestion is to always be testing. Use Followerwonk’s Buffer tool as a yardstick. Be sure to save your original scheduled times before implementing it.

Learn about your followers and follows

One of the most important tools in a company’s marketing program is knowing your target audience. Followerwonk can give you insights into your followers and follows.

Here’s a mapped location of our followers.

No surprises here. If you didn’t know, our site and software is available in German.

Then here’s the bio word cloud:

This gives us clues into what our followers have in common. We often discuss these topics in social media.

Here are the rest of the pie charts:

• Social authority: Rates user’s influence and engagement on scale of 1 to 100.
• Assumed gender of followers: Based on user profile data and guessing.
• Follower counts of Akruto’s followers: The number of people who follow our followers.
• Following counts of Akruto’s followers: The number of people following the people we follow.
• Account ages of Akruto’s followers: How long our followers have been on Twitter. Wow! Almost 40 percent have been on for more than five years.
• Recencies of tweets of Akruto’s followers: Last time our followers have tweeted between never and four years.
• Total tweets of Akruto’s followers: Number of tweets per follower from none to 500k.
• Languages of Akruto’s followers: Almost 94 percent is English with the rest being other.
• Percent of tweets with URLs of Akruto’s followers: The percent of our followers’ total tweets containing links.
• Retweets as a percent of timelines of Akruto followers: How often our followers RT. The more they retweet, the more likely they’ll RT our content.
• @contacts as a percent of timelines of Akruto’s followers: How often our followers’s tweets begin with a @mention. It gives you an idea of their engagement levels.

With these graphs, you can learn a bit about your followers to help confirm or tweak your target audience.

The free account only allows you to compare followers if they don’t go over the threshold. You also can’t always sort the table data.

Free account features include:

• Searching Twitter bios.
• Comparing Twitter users.
• Overlaying your social graph.
• Analyzing followers and follows.

With Followerwonk, you can learn more about your followers so you can adjust your tweeting times and verify the information you have on your target market. It also gives you a different way to discover more people to follow. Rather than simply searching bios, you look for common denominators in other people’s followers and followings. Give it a go and see what you think.