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
- Twitter Clients e.g. Seesmic and Hootsuite
- Influencers e.g. the Twitter tools:
- Twitalyzer, and
- Klout
- Conclusion
Twitter Clients
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 
The study states that “more than three-quarters of the consumers used two or more channels to research and complete the transaction.” While nearly another third used “three or more channels.” However, the majority admitted that they would ultimately go to a store to make the purchase as they wanted to “touch and feel the product.”
