3 Easy Ways to Find Niche Influencers via Twitter

Social media experts often talk about how social media is about listening and engaging with others. In essence, it’s all about having a conversation with others. The question is how do you make sure that you’re talking to the right people? Furthermore, are they people that are actively engaged? How often do they engage? Just how much of an influence do they have over their audience?

The following 3 tools and screencast will help you quickly identify the influencers in your niche.

1. Followerwonk

Followerwonk allows you to scour Twitter profiles for target keywords. For example, if you sell breast cancer gifts online, you can look for breast cancer survivors that blog by entering ‘breast cancer survivor blog’. Followerwonk will then display the following columns:

Screen Name
Real Name
Location
Influence
# of Tweets
# of users they are following
# of followers
How old the account is(by days)

followerwonk

Immediate Benefit: Quickly find niche influencers and sort targets by your preferred metrics.

2. Topsy

Topsy is a Twitter powered search engine that will allow you easily look for people that are engaging with certain content. You can enter in a query such as ‘breast cancer guest blog’ to look for guest blogging opportunities. On the other end, you can just look for influencers talking about breast cancer by just searching for ‘breast cancer’. The added bonus is that Topsy helps you identify ‘Influential’ or ‘Highly Influential’ people, allowing you to create your list faster. Topsy also will pull out unique tweets from certain conversations. You decide what to do from there.

Main Benefit: Another time saver that helps you find the right people and right conversations to engage in.

3. Twellow

Twellow‘s main benefit is stated on it’s homepage: ‘Twellow makes it easy for you to find Twitter followers!’

The utility in this tool comes from the categorization. If you’re looking for popular CEOs or CMOs, you can just pull down the category tab and start creating your list from there.

Main benefit: Twellow is an organized Twitter directory that lets you find relevant people you are looking for.

Bonus Tips

1. When looking for influencers, look for people that ACTUALLY engage – you can immediately see whether a person will talk to you just by scrolling through their latest feed.

Here’s an example of a user that will probably engage with you:

good-engagement

Here’s a user that probably won’t engage with you:

low-engagement

2. Make sure to check when they last tweeted so they’re still active.

3. Don’t go for the close on the first date. Try to ease your way into a conversation with your target. You obviously don’t want to go in with guns slinging trying to pitch your idea/product. People don’t like being sold to. Instead, build a relationship. It might take time, but it’s worthwhile in the long run.

Conclusion

There are a ton of tools out there and it can get overwhelming trying to learn all of them. It’s best if you choose a few that work really well for you and stick with them. If you spend too much time trying to learn new tools, you’ll lose focus on the important work and become a master of tools instead. And it’s tough to make progress that way.

What are some other easy ways to find influencers on Twitter?

Image Credit: Rosaura Ochoa