You Ask, I Answer: Finding Ideal Audience on Twitter?

In today's episode, Erica asks, how do you find your ideal audience on Twitter? Well, I guess it depends on how you define an ideal audience, but Twitter is one of the easiest networks to map and understand. Its API is relatively generous with information, and it contains information that is incredibly valuable. And that information is how different users interact with each other. If I tweet at you, Twitter presents data that allows me to map out one part of the network, talk to another part of the network, and vice versa.

That's not something that you can get uh at all out of uh LinkedIn. Can't get it really out of Facebook. Uh Instagram, you can sorta get it, but only if you have access to the Instagram data API, which not many people do anymore. Um can't do that on Pinterest. So that's one of the reasons why Twitter forms the backbone of most influencer mapping tools, and in fact, arguably a little too much, right?

A little bit too much because it's the most visible of networks. So what is it that you would look for in an ideal audience? You would look for an audience that is topically relevant, you would look for an audience that is highly engaged, um, and you look for an audience that's mostly human, right? That's those are really the kinds of things that you'd want to be looking for to understand uh and follow those folks because they're the ones who that are would then be interacting with you, and their interactions with you would make you visible to their audiences. Right?

It's the whole six degrees of Kevin Bacon thing where uh if you're visible and they're visible and so on and so forth, you can be seen by many more people than you might think. So, how do we find this? Well, uh, let's switch things around here. Let's move over to our our visual display here. The first thing we would need to do, and this is not shown on screen, is get the data out of the Twitter API.

Um, you can do this with social media monitoring tools. Um I use TalkWalker. Uh, you can query the API directly uh if you have programming skills. Once you get that information out of the API, you map it's at uh it's basically a big spreadsheet of who talks to whom, just over and over again, all these different conversations. And what you end up with is this kind of chart.

This is a network graph. And this is a bunch of tweet chats about SEO, uh social media, public relations, communications, uh, for the last month. I'm gonna go ahead and hit the run button here, and oh, let's turn off our strong gravity here. And what we're mapping is is how people interact with each other. Let's zoom out a little bit.

And you can see there are some nodes that are bigger, they're uh larger nodes because those are nodes that people talk to more. Uh and there are some nodes that are small but have a lot of outgoing connections, those are very talkative people who are talking to others, right? This is also, by the way, the the backbone of influencer identification. Who is the most talked about, right? Because whoever's the most talked about that account clearly has the attention of a lot of people.

And if your brand, your handle, whatever was mentioned or talked about by that node, there's a good chance a lot of people would see it. And they're the right kind of people. They're the kind of people who are they're taste makers. Right? They're mavens, if you want to use the Malcolm Gladwell term.

When they talk, everybody listens. And so when we're doing our audience construction, we would want to follow everybody on in this chart here. But especially if we can win over those big accounts. So let's go ahead and stop this now that the network has formed and move over to our preview mode. And let's make this look attractive.

Okay, so now we can see all these different networks. Now, if I care more about say SEO, this green audience is definitely the SEMRush audience, and I'd want to follow them and all these people who are in their audience. If I care about content marketing, it's these CMI here, there's an awful lot of, you know, this purplish, magenta-ish audience. Again, folks that I'd want to spend a lot of time uh following. If I uh cared about things like communications and public relations, uh SF Erica and this this cluster here would be the people to follow.

So what we see is let's zoom into the blue cluster here. We've got some additional folks in this, you know, lightish blue cluster. I'm not sure what account they're most associated with. But we can see there's these different communities within the Twitter chat world that we'd want to engage with. Follow all the people who are in the green community or the purple community, or the the grey dark gray community.

Now, you do would you have to do this on Twitter chats? Of course not. You would put in the industry search terms of your choice into your social media monitoring tool to extract the raw data out. Uh if it's industrial concrete or coffee shops or you know, B2B SAS firewalls, whatever the the thing is, finding your ideal audiences, identifying who's talking about that topic, how they interact with each other, and then following the people who are the most interactive in that topic. That's how you find your ideal audience.

Those are the that's how you make your account grow in a sensible way, because you're talking about, and two the people who are having conversations about your your topics and keywords. This is especially powerful if your industry has uh terms or words or jargon that other people don't use. I used to work in uh financial aid, and there's this uh form that many parents know that nobody likes, um, the FAFSA, the free application for federal student aid. Uh that is a term that you don't use except in the context of financial aid. And so following everybody who uses that term uh and then mapping out that conversation cloud and finding who are the most influential people about that term would be a great way to very quickly grow an account, say if you were creating a social media account about student loans and financial aid.

That's how you would do that. Um if you are in email marketing, uh there are the three protocols, SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. Uh if you were trying to grow an email marketing account, following people who are using those terms would be a clear and easy way to map out that audience and understand who are the the big names uh who are the most talked about in that particular audience. So having that jargon makes it very easy to to slice things down. Same with hashtags.

Um if you have a major trade show once a year, taking that trade show's hashtag and then seeing who's having conversations, especially this year, uh 2020, when all the shows are virtual and many are free. Uh you can map out and see people having conversations about a show that they might not have paid to go to in the past, but because it's free and online this year, you can see those conversations, map them out, and then build your audience from there. So that's how you find your ideal audience. Now, the bad news is that this process, there isn't an off-the-shelf boxed product, right? This is typically something you have to do yourself or hire somebody to do it for you, because it's connecting three or four different technologies together, gluing them together and building uh this map.

But once you do it, and once you have, you know, you've collected the data, you don't have to do this every single day, right? You can st uh in fact let me pull up the spreadsheet for this. You get out of it an output that looks just like uh any ordinary spreadsheet and with all the different rankings of who's most important within your your space. And that is your starting point, right? You have all the handles, and you can just go through go down and start following people and see how your audience grows based on who follows you back, and then it's up to you to have interactions with these people, right?

So the most followed, the most engaged folks, you don't just follow them and expect magic to happen. You have to go and do the work, right? You have to go and engage with people, you have to have conversations, uh, share their stuff. Uh everything that you would uh any you know public relations professional would know is like these are the things I need to do to get the attention of the tastemakers in my industry, uh following them, engaging with them, resharing their stuff, retweeting them, commenting, you know, liking their stuff, all that kind of thing to build your network. So that's the last part of the process is doing the work to engage that ideal audience.

But this is how you do it. If you want to do it as fast as possible and as effective as possible. If you have follow up questions, leave them in the comments box below. Subscribe to the YouTube channel and the newsletter. I'll talk to you soon.

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