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

What is the average age of the reader of your blog?  Or, what’s the age distribution of the readers of your “competitors” blog, tweets, Facebook page …

I’ve been exploring Google’s Ad Planner to find an answer to some of these questions.  With Ad Planner you can:

“Identify websites your target customers are likely to visit

• Define audiences by demographics and interests
• Search for websites relevant to your target audience
• Access unique users, page views, and other data for millions of websites from over 40 countries”

It’s the last bullet point above that I’ll be exploring in this post.

As a starter let’s consider some Social Media sites: Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn – well that should be the majority!  The overall age distribution for these Social Network sites for the UK, and the US (for comparison) is:

Drilling down on the UK users only, and to enhance the comparison I’ve added  “Club Penguin” (Disney’s: “virtual world for children” UK users only), and “Age Concern” (soon to be called “Age UK”: “… to promote the well-being of all older people …”):



No surprises for Club Penguin with, for the UK, 50% of it’s users (“unique visitors per month”) being under 18.  And, for Age UK the majority, nearly a quarter, of its users are aged 55-65, with 55% of them being over 45 years old.

But what of the Social Media sites and UK users?  For Twitter (UK) over half are aged between 25 – 45 years old, with the majority, nearly a third, being 25-35 years old.  This is almost repeated for Facebook (UK), and LinkedIn (UK) but in the latter case over three quarters of it’s UK users are aged between 25 and 55 – which is not surprising given the use of LinkedIn.

When compared with the US, however, you’ll find that the majority users are older for all three Social Media sites.  With over a quarter of the majority of users of Twitter (US), and just under a third of the LinkedIn (US) users, being aged 35-45.  Surprisingly, the majority age range for Facebook (US) is older than Facebook (UK) with some quarter of the users being 45-55 years old – though this may be a reflection of the origins of Facebook in the US.

When the population size (“number of unique visitors per month”) is included a representation of age distribution of Social Media users for the UK and US can be derived.  From Ad Planner the number of “users” are: Twitter (UK) – 3.8 million, Twitter (US) – 21 million; Facebook (UK) – 25 million, Facebook (US) – 130 million; and LinkedIn (UK) – 2.4 million, LinkedIn (US) – 16 million.  Giving an age distribution of Social Media users by Country:

This shows a distinct bias!  The majority of Social Media users in the UK are aged 25-35 years, whereas in the US they are significantly older being 45-55 years old.  A calculation of the average ages gives; Twitter: 37 (UK) – 39 (US), Facebook: 36 (UK) – 38 (US), and LinkedIn: 40 (UK) – 45 (US).  So quite similar bias towards the older users of Twitter and Facebook in the US, but with a significantly older  user of LinkedIn in the US.

Finally, when gender is included another significant difference is apparent between the UK and the US users of Social Media sites:

For both Twitter and Facebook some 60% of the Social Media users in the US are female.  This is almost reversed for the UK with 57% of the Twitter users, and 45% of the Facebook users, being male.  For the US the bias is less obvious with an almost equal distribution of the genders accessing LinkedIn (52% female, 48% male).  Whilst the majority of UK users of LinkedIn are male at 59%.

The Google Ad Planner site also displays traffic statistics including the daily trend in visitors over a set period (1 year).  For example, below is the traffic statistics for Twitter for UK visitors for the year ending February 2010.

That all goes to show that Google knows a great deal about us! (see: “A special report on managing information: Clicking for gold“, The Economist)

Google is truly quite an amazing Company.   Facts and Figures below – enjoy …

(Original post, with some minor corrections, can be found here: http://www.pingdom.com/ – “Pingdom offers services to monitor the uptime and performance of websites and servers on the Internet“).

Today (Tuesday 2 Feb.) an enterprise collaboration tool from SAP, that is based on Google Wave, will enter public beta.  With the informative beta name 12Sprints, the application will allow “users to collaborate on solving business problems in real time.”

Being dependent on Google Wave, SAP will be following Google’s classic approach with 12Sprints having a beta period that will “never end.”  In acknowledgement of this, David Meyer (senior vice president of emerging technologies, SAP) has stated that the “… whole idea is to learn from [its] usage.”

Why is this interesting?  Software giant SAP have plans to launch web-based sales management software (i.e. SaaS) in the middle of 2010 – they will be competing directly with their long term rival salesforce.com.

Of course, there’s the obligatory YouTube video’s (there are 13 in all) for 12Sprints:

And, you can become a friend on Facebook, and follow the beta on Twitter …

12Sprints is an example of an Enterprise 2.0 tool – a tool that enables decisions based on the response from multiply persons within the organisation.  But, essentially it employs the same tools used to make a decision as “normal” business group might.  However, SAP appear to be taking Enterprise 2.0 serious.  Below is a brief video of part of a round-table held by SAP titled “Enterprise 2.0 – A Look into the Crystal Ball” (this video is about Gravity a forerunner of 12Sprints).

Observe, 12Sprints is an excellent example of the use of Google’s Wave within the organisation, but it’s not a replacement for Twitter, Facebook, e-mail, etc (i.e. unlike salesforce.com’s Chatter – which is yet to become available in the wild.  In beta, or otherwise!).

The Google Trends site, at http://www.google.com/trends for “worldwide traffic”, is an invaluable research tool.  For example a search on the trends in Google searches of the phrase “Social CRM” (include the quotes) produces the following chart

Notes: this in excess of 25 search volume index means that the “traffic” is 25 times the average for the 12 months.  Similarly, this isn’t absolute search traffic numbers – instead, Trends has scaled the results for “social CRM” so that the  average search traffic in the 12 months is 1.0.

Curiously, the results claim that “No [related] news articles were found”, and that the regional breakdown of the search phrase “social crm” has India (adjusted to 1.00) as the main source of the query, followed by the United States at 19% and the United Kingdom at 17%?  So there’s more than five times the interest in Social CRM in India than there is in either the US, or the UK.  I wonder what this chart will look like in twelve months time?

This week in GOOGLE #23, “What Should Google Do?“

This week in GOOGLE, or TWig, is a podcast covering Google and all thing cloud computing.  Hosted by Leo Laporte, Gina Trapani, and Jeff Jarvis.  Jeff Jarvis, in particular, is the author of What Would Google Do?, blogs about media and news at Buzzmachine.com, and is associate professor and director of the City University of New York’s new Graduate School of Journalism.

This being the first TWig episode of 2010 the discussion is about the future and “what should Google do?”

The team agree that Google doesn’t yet feel professional enough, yet it must expand into the Enterprise area in 2010 as there’s nothing left for it to do but create an Enterprise revenue stream.  But is Google ready for the Enterprise?  The team compare Google with Amazon, and salesforce.com, and decide Google is not as trustworthy (Marc Benioff, CEO salesforce.com, will be absolutely delighted to know he’s being compared with Amazon – Amazon being Marc’s inspiration when formulating salesforce.com …)  Jeff  then celebrates salesforce.com, “salesforce really knows how to serve business … ,” and “knows what a business needs.”  So, Google is going to have to prove that it’s more than merely search and advertising in 2010.

Another programme on worth tracking down is CNBCs “Inside The Mind of Google”

Earlier this week, 30th September 2009, Google opened up their Wave preview to about 100,000 people.  Salesforce.com, with their interest in the service cloud , are naturally one of the first to demo Wave integrated with their CRM.  In a Salesforce Force.com Blog entry called “Getting in Front of the Wave” you will find background details on Google’s Wave and a YouTube video  (see below) on how the Wave platform might be integrated with Salesforce.com …

I use it so I must recommend it.  But, actually I do think it is the best of breed platform for Blogging, and probably the most popular blogging platform.

Now a Blog is your Real Estate,  your property that is fixed in location, on the web.  Your blog’s content is not like your content in LinkedIn, Facebook, or even Twitter – for it’s accessible by search engines, and not closed like those other forms of social media – you don’t have to login to view the full content.  So to be fully visible on the web you must have a Blog, and your choice of Blogging platform is critical.

So, here once you’ve got WordPress installed, are two links to get you started.  From Lifehacker (tag line:  Tips and downloads for getting things done) is The Beginner’s Guide to Tricking Out Your WordPress Blog, and from Mark Ghosh’s WeblogToolsCollection Schwag is WordPress for Beginners.

Of course, you must then install the All in One SEO Pack (SEO: search engine optimization) for a properly “executed SEO techniques will bring your website increased exposure, recognition, and will generate free traffic“, and Google XML Sitemaps a plugin that generates a XML-Sitemap of your blog that supports “Ask.com, Google, YAHOO and MSN Search.”

Then it’s just a matter of regularly generating interesting content, and “they will come” … easy. in’it.