Followerwonk: How it Can Help Grow and Engage Your Twitter Followers

Building a Twitter following that is engaged, and exceeds ten people – who are not friends and family – can be a difficult task. Followerwonk is a great tool that we regularly use at Fresh Egg that can solve this issue.

It may have a silly name, but this Moz-owned Twitter tool has a lot of great features that we recommend all marketers using Twitter are aware of.

As well as growing your follower-count, Followerwonk also helps you:

• find relevant Twitter users to follow
• analyse the demographics of your Twitter followers and your competitors’ followers
• find out when your followers are most frequently online
• analyse the number of followers gained and lost
• analyse your tweets or a competitor’s tweets

This post focuses on the first bullet point, to show you how you can grow a relevant and engaged community on Twitter, using Followerwonk.

Build a relevant and engaged community

Twitter is a powerful tool for any brand – it builds influence by creating conversations with customers, enabling them to instantly engage with the people they wish to sell to. So building a strong following on Twitter is crucial.

When setting up and managing your Twitter account, always consider your objectives for this channel. Do you want to build a community, provide customer service or drive people to your blog?

But it is no longer so much about numbers, follower count is simply a vanity metric if these followers have no interest in your services. Having engaged, relevant followers on Twitter will help increase the reach of your tweets and content. An active Twitter presence can also lead to an increase in visibility of your brand in search results.

How can you grow a relevant community on Twitter?

Followerwonk’s most valuable feature, for me, is the ‘Search bios’ tab. For those with brand new Twitter accounts or accounts that have been slow to grow followers, this function can help.

1. Search by job title, interest or keyword

Who is your ideal customer? What are their interests? What is their job title? Put a relevant keyword in the search bar to search the bios of everyone on Twitter for these people. Follow those relevant users to extend awareness of your brand on Twitter (and hope that they follow you back)

2. Search by location

Add more targeting by searching by location. Select the ‘Advanced search’ tab and then enter your location. This can be country or city based

1. Download search results

To look at this in closer detail and group certain audience personas together, download the data to a spreadsheet. That way you can decide on your priorities and develop an ongoing strategy

2. Filter by “no relationship” (Moz Pro users)

For those using Followerwonk with their Moz Pro account (see end of blog post for further details), you can filter your results by relationship. The most beneficial way to use this feature if you are looking for new followers, is to filter by “no relationship”, as shown below

1. Follow from within Followerwonk (Moz Pro users)

Another great feature for pro users is that you can simply follow users from within the platform

Find influencers and potential brand advocates

The ‘search bios’ tab also enables you to select the Twitter users who are most likely to engage with you (and share your content with their followers). Engaging with active and influential Twitter users related to your industry can dramatically increase the reach of your tweets.

For example, if you are a company specialising in UK cottage holidays, engaging with national travel bloggers could be beneficial for seeding your content. Building rapport with engaged Twitter users can also lead to happy customers and brand advocates further down the line. However, how do you decide who the right people to target are? This is where Followerwonk can be really valuable.

1. Sort by ‘Social Authority’

Social Authority is a reliable metric scored out of 100, which is calculated by:

• The retweet rate of users' last few hundred tweets
• How recently they have tweeted
• A retweet-based model trained on user profile data

Those with a Social Authority score of higher than 50 are more likely to be able to influence a large audience. When searching bios, sort the list by Social Authority to find these users, as shown below:

1. Look at engagement score

Hover over each person in the list, you will see a ‘Total engagement’ score. This is based on the percentage of that user’s tweets that are replies or retweets, determining how often they engage as opposed to broadcast. These people will be more likely to tweet you back once you have started a conversation and, therefore, they are the people you need to search for when deciding on those to target to help promote your content.

Once you have your list of prospects, follow them and begin engaging. If you’re using an outreach tool, like Buzzstream you can download your list and upload in Buzzstream. This can help you keep track of your relationships.

What else can you do if you have a Moz account?

Followerwonk and Moz joined forces in 2012, so if you have a Moz Pro subscription you can link your accounts up. 

Alternatively the free version of Followerwonk still offers plenty of features and insight.

If you’re interested in understanding more about how Followerwonk and Twitter Analytics can be used to analyse your Twitter audience, we’ll be blogging about this in the near future. Subscribe to our emails at the top right of this post and you’ll be notified as soon as this is published. In the meantime, keep up-to-date with social media by following Fresh Egg on Twitter.

If you require social media strategic advice or an audit of your current social media activity, please give our expert social team a call on 0845 373 1077 today.