Why are you reading this article? Did you find it yourself or did someone influence you? Did someone suggest that you take a look, or share it wth you on social media? Companies in North America spend around $250m a year on influencer marketing, according to InNetwork. This week in SMToolbox we take a look at Twtrland and how its influencer search tools can help you improve your influencer marketing.
Influencer Marketing
Influencers are people that can sway consumer decisions. Influencers have a key role because they are trusted; typically, they are seen as an authority and authentic in their views. These days influencers can have extensive reach due to social networks and can influence many tens of thousands of people or very specific niches of customers. It is partly for these reasons that we are seeing influencer marketing evolve into a core marketing channel.
Influencer marketing, however, is not straightforward. There are a number of key challenges, such as how to identify the influencers in your space or topic, how to measure their real influence, how to engage with these influencers, how to get them to recommend your brand or product, and so forth.
For many people, the starting point for outreach work is to build Twitter lists. This enables you to follow the streams of selected groups of people rather than your whole stream. But who do you include? Who are the key influencers? Twtrland is a very useful tool in helping you to answer these questions and to build your list of influencers.
Twtrland has built a database of information linked to Twitter profiles which gives you the ability to search and analyze user profiles. It has also added Facebook and Instagram to help you analyze your online presence and I understand other networks are being added.
Twtrland helps you in two main ways:
- analysis of your own social profile and influence
- finding key influencers in your area by searching social profiles
In this post we are going to explore the second of these, namely how Twtrland helps you find and engage with influencers in your market. However, it is worth noting you can get detailed analysis and statistics on your own profile with Twtrland such as the location of your followers, their age profile, location, etc.
Twtrland stores profiles of over 200m users and the team have developed groupings of influencers in 60,000 topic areas. They use a combination of machine intelligence and human indexing to identify these influencers. They also they identify influencers based on the content they produce and share as well as the information in their bios. The 60,000 topics cover a lot of ground though they may still not be sufficient if you are reseraching particular niche areas.
Finding Influencers
One of the great strengths of Twtrland is that it is easy to use. To find influencers just sign in with your Twitter account (or Facebook or Instagram). Then click the 'find influencers' menu option on the left to access the initial search option below.
This allows you to find influencers in one of the 60,000 topic areas in a particular location. In this example I searched for influencers in social media in Brighton in the UK and twtrland returned the results below. You can refine the results further with the Pro version which allows you to filter by skills, gender and age profile.
You can see the profile of the influencers and their scores for amplification (the reach of their content to extended networks via retweets and replies), reach (their numbers of followers and type of followers and relevance (based on the content they share).
Anayzing Influencers
Twtrland gets particularly interesting when you dive into the profile of an influencer. In this case I chose the top influencer listed from the search above.Twtrland provides you with four tabs that provide detailed information including an overview.
Below is the Analysis tab which provides a breakdown of the influencer's network such as audience size, activity, amplification and engagement. You can follow the influencer directly from within Twtrland but the 'add to list' feature is restricted to the paid for Pro plan.
The Network tab provides you with useful information on the influencer's followers and who the influencer engages with most regularly as you can see below. You can filter further by skills, age, etc., with the Pro edition.
The Demographics tab provides you with a useful overview of their followers such as their:
- gender
- age
- location
This allows you to check whether their followers are the audience you are targeting or are similar to your own followers. Twtrland provides you automatically with a similarity percentage such as a percentage of followers that match the geography of your own followers or that match the skills of your followers.
Summary
In my view, influencer marketing is going to continue to grow in importance and building outreach lists will be a core task for many marketers. There are many tools that will provide you with influencer lists, but Twtrland provides you with in-depth profile information enabling you to analyze the suitability of influencers for your work.
If you are looking to build an outreach list for your influencer marketing, take a look at Twtrland and explore how it could support you.
The examples above are from the free version of Twtrland. The free version is fairly restricted; for example, you can't add people directly to lists or use the advanced filters in the tool. However, the more advanced functionality is available with Twtrland paid plans that start at $19.99 a month for the Pro version and $99 a month for the Business Edition.
Column logo by Marie Otsuka