This is part 2, the concluding part of how to grow your Twitter Following – part 1 can be found  here.

In part 1 we covered:

• Twitter Tags
• Monitoring clients e.g. Monitter
• Googlelabs Follow finder
• Twitter Lists
• Google Custom searches – including time-lines

In this final part we’ll be covering:

• Twitter Clients e.g. Seesmic and Hootsuite
• Influencers e.g. the Twitter tools:
  • Twitalyzer, and
  • Klout
• Conclusion

Twitter Clients

Two very effective Twitter clients that lend themselves to finding new people to follow are: Seesmic and Hootsuite.

Seesmic (with the claim that it’s “…the most popular social software clients that allow users to easily access their social networks in one application“) will enables you, via it’s Contacts tab, to directly access the standard metrics of a Contact plus their tweeps that they have the most contact with.  The Contacts listing can be filtered by: all your Contacts, your Following or Followers, by any of the Lists you’ve subscribed to, or by any collection and filter of the above.  So, for example, you could select just those you are Following, filtered by “water” to list (in my case) two tweeps: @charitywater, and @WaterAid.  Selecting from WaterAid presents, amongst other informative metrics, their three “Most contacted” tweeps:

Seesmic: Contacts - Most contacted From the Most contacted list you can drill down to display their metrics.  E.g. for @EndWaterPoverty

Seesmic: Select End Water Poverty and click Follow And, then directly Follow them …

The People Tab in Hootsuite enables you to do an almost identical task.  So for example in the screen capture from the Hootsuite client below, you can see from the people that I am Following (in bold), that Meryl K. Evans (@merylkevans) is Following me (the √ tick), has (at the time of this post) over 6,500 following her, nearly 7,000 that she is following, and has a Klout score of 40 (see below under Influencer/Klout as to what this means …).  The little star icon to the right of the Klout score will allow me to Follow, or Unfollow Meryl, … , or add her to a List.

Hootsuite: People - Following

Influencers

Perhaps, “How many am I following?” is too crude measure? Maybe you should be following those that provide you with relevant (to your strategy!) tweets, or regularly post links to sources of quality information that’s relevant to your strategy. Rather than follow them merely because they follow you, or because their your Twitter friends and you enjoy the conversation with them. Fortunately, source for these richer Twitter metrics are becoming available on the web. The Twitalyzer client uses (amongst other measures) a Tweeps Clout, Generosity, Engagement, Impact, … (see here for Twitalyzer definition of these terms).  So, for example, Twitalyzer’s list of the most influential twitters of Twitter are:

Twitalyzer: The most Influential people on "Twitter"

Of all these emerging Twitter metrics Influence is potentially the most informative (see for background a Post by Scott Karp (@scottkarp) in Publishing 2.0 (2008),  “Influentials On The Web Are People With The Power To Link“).  In the case of Twitter, Influence is the likelihood that a user will either a) retweet something the you has tweeted, or b) reference you.  Either way, these RTs, or mentions, are received by their extensive list of Followers – thereby giving you credibility, and even greater reach …

The Twitter client Klout “… believe that every individual who creates content online has influence.” Has the “… goal is to measure that influence and make it even more effective.”  Klout have taken the art of Twitter metrics to whole new level!

Klout: What Influencers are talking about - Right now!

Klout: Topics - "Social Media Tools" Under the Topics tab you can enter a search phrase (but, only those predefined by Klout) to list Influences in specific areas – for example (above), Twitter Influencers in the area of “Social Media Tools” Of relevance here is the Klout score.  The Klout Score is a number, between 1 and 100, that represents “the size and strength of a [users] sphere of influence on Twitter.” Klout claim that by using more than 25 factors, based on reach (number of followers), engagement (how many @ replies you receive), and velocity (how often your messages get re-tweeted) it can identify “your ability to drive people to action” – to reply, to retweet, or to click on a link in your tweet … Drilling down on mparent77772 (i.e. Marc Parent) in the above example gives:

Klout: Influencers - Social Media Tools: Marc Parent (@mparent77772) So, now you know if Marc is somebody you wish to Follow … good Klout score, Marc!

Klout's analysis of Marc Parent

Now the only complication with this approach is that you are following them – they are not necessarily following you.  You can see their tweets in your Twitter stream, but they may not be necessarily be reading yours!

You can, however, use Klout’s Influencer Analysis (above, for Marc – but you can also enter your own username!) to identify factors that you might include in your Twitter Strategy to enhance your Influence on the ecosystem …

Then the advise stands.  Do choose Influencers that engaged in relevant conversations, engage frequently and recently in conversations about topics aligned with your strategy, that are frequently referred to by others in relevant conversations, that engage in conversation, and have a reputation – and set out to capture their attention!

Conclusion

This has not been a balanced Post.  It’s focused only on a few Twitter clients and resources, and then only clients that are free, and then only on a small portion of each clients functionality.  The clients I’ve mentioned are constantly improving their functionality, and new and better entrants are emerge daily.  Indeed, the Twitter ecosystem could be significantly disrupted by the the soon to be released Twitter Annotation feature (i.e. the addition of metadata text – most likely a very 350+ characters.  So, for example, hashtags could be moved from the existing limited 150 characters of your tweet to become terms in an attached comma separated list …)

First then must come your Strategy. There’s too little time to explore even a small proportion of the proliferation of Twitter clients emerging daily (if you want to explore some other clients, see Twitter Tools – for “Tips from the internets“), let alone monitor even a small portion of the tweets.  So what’s your plan? To start conversations with your on-line community, to improve customer prospecting, to move towards greater customer centricity? To pitch to your followers, reward their loyalty.  Or, to provide your organisation with a rich set of data including sentiment, demographic coverage, influence? Will you be using Twitter just for PR, for competitive intelligence, or just to protect you “Brand”?  Whatever, you’ll need to grow your Following …

Which ever route you take: good luck … and do feel free to let me know how you’re progress in this fascinating area of social media.

One of the entries in your Social Media Strategy, under the section labelled Twitter metrics,  will most likely be the entry “How many people am I following?“  So, this post is an introduction to finding friends to follow on Twitter.

I’ll be covering in part 1:

• Twitter Tags
• Monitoring sites e.g. Monitter
• Googlelabs Follow finder
• Twitter Lists
• Google Custom searches – including time-lines

First let’s clarify the distinction between the Twitter terms: Followers, and Following – two of the most prominent metrics reported directly on your Twitter home page.

A Follower is somebody that has chosen to follow you.  They have visited your website, your blog, or received an email or newsletter from you that included a link to your Twitter  account.  They’ve then elected to follow your Tweets.  Essentially, these are your friends.  Your Tweets appear in their Twitter stream – listed on their Twitter Home Page.  Critically, for these followers, your tweets are separate from the “noisy” Twitter Public time-line …!

Whilst the people, or organisations, that you are Following appear in your Home page – your twitter steam.  It’s this latter group that we’ll be focusing on in this post.

So how might you go about systematically finding people to follow?

#Tags

I’m sure you’ve already come across a hashtag. It’s a tweet that includes a term prefixed with #  – i.e. the hash symbol, hence the term hashtag.  For example, #ashtag (get it: hashtag!) is currently (April 2010) included in tweets discussing the volcanic ash from Iceland that is affecting air travel in North Western Europe.

Search on a hashtag will provide you with people that you might want to follow.   Firstly then some example hashtags:

a) the use of the #nonprofit hashtag (and #ngo, and ‘humanrights) by Timo Luege of @Sm4good:

Social media case studies for non-profit organizations: http://bit.ly/cW06kf #ngo #nonprofit #humanrights

b) the use of #CharityTuesday hashtag by Sheila Britton of @sheb57:

#charitytuesday Check out @Nomads_land, solo walking entire British coastline (7000miles) for charity ……amazing !! :-)

c) alternatively you might follow a hashtag used for a particular #{Event}:

For example the use of an #{Event} hashtag in a Tweet by Amnesty International for their 2010 AGM:

Today is the last day to register online for #agm10! We’ll be tweeting from the event @AmnestyAGM

So find a relevant (to your Strategy!) hashtag, search for it regularly, and you should a find possible Tweeps that will be worth your while following.

Lost for that hashtag?  To find a hashtag you could use http://hashtags.org/, or if there some current event (that is relevant to your organisation or strategy) that is being followed in the media then it’s most likely a trending topic in Twitter.  See, for example: http://www.whatthetrend.com/.  But be aware that not everybody is familiar with, or regularly uses or consistently uses, hashtags.  Take, for example, the term nonprofit.  It might appear with, or without, the prefix # – see http://trendistic.com/nonprofit

Twitter monitoring sites

There’s a proliferation of sites that enable you to monitor Twitter – and the growth in monitoring sites is unlikely to abate.  One you might like to explore is Monitter (“Simple. It’s a twitter monitor, it lets you “monitter” the twitter world for a set of keywords and watch what people are saying“).  With Monitter you can view several columns of Twitter streams each filter by a keyword, or phrase.

So, for example, you good track the terms: “social media”, and “#socialmedia” …

Monitter: Social Media & #socialmedia Twitter streams

Again, your objective is to identify a user in these streams that’s worth you following.

Googlelabs: Follow finder

Google, once again, comes to your rescue!

Google now offers, with classic Google stark  simplicity,  a Follow finder site: http://www.followfinder.googlelabs.com/

For example, entering the Twitter username salesforce (i.e. a username that aligns with your criteria of somebody you would follow, or are following) Follow finder produces two columns of Tweeps …

One column of “Tweeps you might like” to follow e.g. @gartner_inc, @forrester, … . And, a separate column of “Tweeps with similar followers” e.g. @salesforcedocs, @forcedotcom, …

You can obviously have endless fun with this site and completely exhaust your Twitter quota for the day entering Twitter usernames; checking bio’s (the short Twitter biography that many users complete), and some of their current tweets to see if they align with your strategy … to see if they’re worth following.

(Note: the @ prefix is to identify a username, and is used when replying to the user.  It’s also a mention … easy in’it -see Twitter Help)

Similarly, as your count of Followers grows, you’ll need to return Follow finder to continue to extend your reach.

Twitter Lists

Late last year (November 2009) Twitter launched Twitter Lists: “… a new way to organize the people you’re following on Twitter, or find new people.“  A Twitter List enables you to group together users on Twitter into lists  so that you see a curated Twitter stream of their tweets.  Better still, Twitter allow you to include people in your lists that you’re not following …  See the excellent Mashable (“… the world’s largest blog focused exclusively on Web 2.0 and Social Media news“) guide: HOW TO: Use Twitter Lists

Obviously you can create you own list (see: Twitter’s How To Use Twitter Lists), alternatively you can capture somebody else’s List.  An example is Listorious (“The definitive list of who matters on Twitter“) website where there are two routes: Lists and Tags.  For example below: “Charity Lists”, and the Top Tag’s page:

Listorious: Charity list

Listorious: Top Tags

Following a relevant list from your Twitter account will enable you to identify new Tweeps to follow.  Similarly, with the Top Tags, you can choose to follow, for example, top Social Media Lists:

Clicking the Listorious “FOLLOW” link copies the SOMEECARDS list to your Twitter Home page …

Twitter Lists are a very powerful tool directly available from your Twitter home page.  The other great opportunity of Lists is that they can be used to filter your Twitter stream – so that with different Lists, for example, you can focus your communications.  Better still, if you’re not the owner (the “curator”) of the list, you may find additional relevant users are being added to the list for you i.e. return frequently to your Twitter Lists.

Google Custom searches

Twitter has a very good Advanced Search page – but Google provides two (at least!) very powerful search tools that should be included in your Twitter Metrics portfolio.  One of these is Google’s Custom Search Engine.  With this tool you can create your own search pages that exclusively searches only web sites you’ve named.  The “Twitter.com” site, say! You can then also apply specific Search engine keywords that further filter the results.

The other Google tool is the Time-line feature available on the “standard” Google search results page:

Google Search: Ash - click on "Show options ..."

Google Search: Ash - Options enabled. Click on "Updates" then "April"

Google Search: Ash - Time-line for April

Observe that, for this time-line, there’s little traffic including the term “ash” before 15th April, and that all the returned results are from Twitter!

End of part 1

The concluding part of this Post can be found here …

This post has been updated and now appears as two Posts:

• How to: Grow your Twitter Following (part 1) – here
• How to: Grow your Twitter Following (part 2) – here

Continuing with my focus on all things Twitter, I’ve just found a new tool!

High on my agenda for March was: Build a Twitter following.  Discovering tools that might support me in this task has been exhausting – there are so many of them!  But, today I’ve got Klout …

Klout, to put it simply, “measures influence across the social web.“  Launched a year ago, at SXSW Interactive 2009, Klout currently has (according to Compete) just over 90,000 unique visitors per month.

One of Klout’s features is that it can be used to identify top influencers by topic; “… to find the people the world listens to.“  For example, entering “Social Media“, presents the Klout’s list of  Top Influencers to follow:

The essential component of this list is the Klout Score.  This number, between 1 and 100, represents “the size and strength of a your sphere of influence on Twitter.“  Klout’s claim is that by using more than 25 factors, based on reach (number of followers), engagement (how many @ replies you receive), and velocity (how often your messages get re-tweeted) it can identify “your ability to drive people to action” – to reply, to retweet, or to click on a link in your tweet …

The example below is the Klout score for Michael Fauscette (Group Vice President, Software Business Solutions, IDC.  With LinkedIn Bio, “Senior software executive and industry analyst with worldwide expertise in developing profitable, scalable fast growth organizations” – and, yet he only scores 46!):

So, Fauscette, to improve his score, will have to up his Demand (“engage with others”),  and Engagement (build “relationships through conversation”).

Further, Klout places Fauscette as a Connector in it’s Connector-Persona-Casual-Climber grid:

And, as for me? Well Klout has identified me as a Climber – in the bottom right corner of the quadrant.  I’m “... building an audience and finding [my] voice.“  But, I need to engage “… more with others and [build] trust“, so that I can “move towards the upper right corner and then into the Persona quadrant“  … Heigh Ho!

Apparently we are currently tweetering (sorry!) on 50 million tweets per day! That’s almost 600 tweets per second!

At its launch in 2007 Twitter had an average of 5,000 tweets a day.  By 2008, this had grown to 300,000.  By 2009 it reached 2.5 million per day.  So that’s 2,000% growth rate since January 2009!

These enchanting growth figures, however, need some interpretation as they represent total traffic.   Kevin Weil (Twitter analytics team), wrote on the company blog, “Tweet deliveries are a much higher number, because once created, tweets must be delivered to multiple followers.  Then there’s search and so many other ways to measure and understand growth across the information network. “  Whilst, according to comScore (a marketing research company) in January 2010, Twitter’s site attracted 73.5 million unique individuals.

Nevertheless,  Sean Garrett (vice president of communications at Twitter) claims that 20 per cent of all tweets, that’s roughly 120 tweets every second and growing, “contain a reference to a product or brand.”

Phil Stewart, of Virgin Media Business, compounds these figures with a warning.  Published in last months Computer Business Review, Stewart reports that whilst 57 of the UK’s top 100 companies have Twitter accounts (most likely only to avoid cybersquatters), only 28 of them are using Twitter to chat with their customers.  Stewart claims that this failure to use twitter could cost these companies dearly.  Twitter, he argues, “presents an excellent opportunity for companies to engage with customers.”  He continues, “… not responding to tweets by your customers is no better than opening a contact centre and not picking up the phone … [this is being] viewed by millions.  Companies should respond to customer enquires and take part in conversations about their brand …”

Still not sure about Twitter?  Twitter has @CleverAccounts – with the bio:

Follow us to learn about interesting uses of Twitter from across the world. @mention us if you have your own use case!

If you prefer an RSS feed to tweets then Twitter also posts these @CleverAccounts tweets on Posterous (“the dead simple way to put anything on-line using email“).  The page is called Clever Twitter Accounts (and, the RSS feed  is here).  The @CleverAccounts Posterous tag line? ‘Twitterers that make you say, “Now I get it!“‘ Do you?