Understanding your Followers on Twitter

Every day I come across some scheme telling me how I can gain more twitter followers. Many so "Twitter experts" talk and write all day long about how to get more twitter followers. But how do you know if you have (or are gaining) the right kind of followers? Some of your follower constantly engage with you and you probably know who they are. But what about the rest of them? Who are they? What do they do? Are they the right audience for you? How can you create a right message to get their attention?

Understanding your Followers

One way to understand your followers is to look at their twitter bios and analyze the stuff they are tweeting about. This will help you gain understanding of their motivations. But all this is not trivial, so I started looking for a tool that will help me do this. Well, I had partial success and found a tool called TwitterSheep . TwitterSheep allows you to build a tag cloud based the bios of your followers on twitter. However it does not allow you to build a tag based on the tweets of your followers.

Still More is Required

As mentioned above this tool does not provide all the information that you need to understand your followers. Knowing what your followers tweet about; will be even more powerful than just their bios. Their tweets will tell you exactly what triggers their interest and help you in engaging with them. But TwitterSheep does not do that yet. So for now I will take whatever I can get (Hope TwitterSheep team is paying attention).

Competitive Analysis with TwitterSheep

Twittersheep is also a great addition to my competitve analysis tool. You can build a tag cloud for the follower of your competitors and see how their followers compare to yours (See below how @alaskaair follower compare to @virginamerica.).

Alaska Air twitter followers bio

 Virgin America twitter followers bio

I have not yet found any other tool that will let me build a tag cloud of what my follower are tweeting about but I will let you know if I find one. If you know of such a tool then please let me know. If you are a developer looking to build more stuff on twitter API’s then here is an idea for you, ping me and I can provide you more information.

• Best Time to Tweet?
• Twitter Analytics
• 3 KPIs for Measuring Twitter Success
• All of my posts on Twitter

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