Anyone that manages a brand’s Twitter account hears a lot about follower counts.
Some managers and clients look at followers as the ultimate success metric and go to great lengths to keep it growing. Certainly, follower count is useful to show reach, but many social media folks are searching for deeper insights about their audience.
Last week Simply Measured launched Export.ly to solve this problem (as well as similar issues on Facebook fan pages). It’s been fun to watch users share these insights about their Twitter followers. I wanted to highlight 5 ways you can peal back the onion on your follower count:
1.) When Should I Tweet? Follower Time Zone Analysis.
Analyzing your audience by time zone can be useful to find out when your audience is likely to be awake and online. It can also expose insights about the distribution of your audience by region and country.
For example, we pulled the report for @Nascar’s audience by time zone. Their large following is almost entirely in the US and heavily focused on the eastern and central time zones. They probably won’t be catering content to the west coasters.
2.) How Often Does My Audience Tweet? Activity Analysis.
Growing followers doesn’t always mean those new folks are active and engaged. Analyzing the frequency of your followers tweeting gives a better sense for the real reach of your account.
We looked at the followers of the @socialfresh account as an example. This audience is quite active on twitter – most tweeted within the last week and only 5% are inactive this year.
3.) Which Influencers Follow Me? Top Followers.
Curious about which influencers to target with your Twitter activities? There are a range of methodologies used to find influencers, but why not look to your own audience? For example, take a look at the biggest accounts following Robert Scoble (@scobleizer). Who knew that Ashton Kutcher was a Scoble fan?
4.) How Big is My Secondary Network? Reach of Followers.
If you are looking to extrapolate reach out to the second level, this can be done by simply summing the followers of your audience. This gives you a sense for how big your secondary network is and can be tracked in conjunction with your total follower count over time.
Reach and impressions always seems to be common measurement goals. We also include a couple different kinds of reach metrics in Simply Measured that are conversation oriented vs. this account-based method.
5.) What Are My Followers Interests? Bio Keyword Analysis.
Learning more about your followers interests can help guide the type of content to produce. Bios on Twitter typically provide some rich information about who people are and what they care about. For example, here’s a wordle word cloud for the bios of all the @RowFeeder followers. Not surprising, this audience has a clear leaning toward social media, marketing, and digital.
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