Building a Powerful Twitter Community with Influencers

Using Twitter to boost your company’s growth is about building a community of followers who relate to your industry and who will eventually develop a passion for your brand.

Finding connectors, thought leaders or industry experts and building relationships with them is vital as it’s the quickest and easiest way to build a significant Twitter community.

1- Discover influencers in your network

Use Followerwonk [ https://followerwonk.com ] to check out your current Twitter followers ranked by the platform’s statistic called ‘social authority’, which is based on the retweet rate of users’ latest few hundred tweets, the recentness of those tweets and a retweet-based model trained on user profile data.

2- Learn your competition’s connections

Twitter’s transparency makes competitive research super-accessible and your competitors’ networks are most likely to include influencers who are directly related to your business. Find these connectors on Followerwonk but this time using your competitors’ handles.

3- Look for influencers in your niche

You can use Followerwonk’s ‘social authority’ to guide you through this process but keep in mind that you have to zero in on the tweep’s emphasis as people who are involved in what you do will best fit your community.

Start off by building a list of 15 to 20 people who would be fit to nurture a relationship with.

4- Follow and interact with tweeps

Building your community requires you to focus on the conversations you have. Keep in mind that replying directly to a person will only show up in their timeline and the timelines of people you both follow, so include your response in a retweet, which will reach a greater number of users.

5- Track your influencers’ posts and mentions by setting up alerts

Use tools like Google Alerts [ http://www.google.com/alerts ] and Fresh Web Explorer [http://moz.com/tools/fresh-web-explorer ] to dig up where your industry influencers share their thoughts and opinions outside of Twitter and shine the light on them by sharing on Twitter a good article they’ve written.

6- Add value outside of Twitter

Now that you’ll be aware whenever connectors you follow are mentioned across the web, you’re able to point people’s attention to their relevant resources and maintain mutually beneficial relationships with them.

Share their stories, comment on their blogs and give them a helping hand whenever it’s possible as this will increase the chances you have at them being receptive to what you have to say later on.