Identifying and interacting with social media influencers should be a vital part of your social media strategy. It’s simply not enough to continually pump out your own news, blogs and products hoping that you’ll get the odd retweet or share from one of your already ‘bought-in’ consumers.
In order to really push your campaign forward, you need to have the backing of some of the biggest players in your industry; the movers, the shakers, the thought-leaders, brands and publications that already possess major influence and authority over fan bases bigger than that of your own.
If you’re successful in winning the favour of these people, then your social media activity has the ability to reach a far greater audience, backed up by the power of some of the most authoritative people in social media.
The purpose of this post is to give you a little heads up on where you might be able to find these hallowed beings in the first place.
Google search
An oldie, but a goodie. Simply searching for ‘[travel] twitter accounts’ (or whatever industry you’re prospecting) should yield some pretty good hits right off the bat.
Google search: Top 100s, 50s, 10s
While a simple Google search (as above) is enough to get you started, I’ve actually found that it’s more productive to tap into the ‘Top XX’ searches that bloggers and publications seem so keen to write about. This kind of search yields an even better return for your click and it’s possible you might want to interact with these users on an almost rank-like basis, from bottom to top.
For example, we get two amazing lists ranking on page one for this search: ‘top 100 travel twitter accounts’:
Infographics lists
While these might be somewhat more rare than the above searches, some publications are also turning to ‘Top’ lists using infographics, like Coupon Audit. They regularly break down the most important/successful blogs within a given industry and turn them into infographics, complete with Twitter and Facebook follower numbers:
Twitter tools
Twellow.com – Twellow is a directory of public Twitter accounts that can be broken down into niche subcategories, such as business travel. By default, it sorts the most-followed users. It also has search features.
Topsy.com – Topsy is more limited in its free version than Twellow; however, it counts influencers (judged by the number of mentions an account has had) as one of its searchable metrics, alongside videos, tweets, links and photos.
Followerwonk.com – Followerwonk is particularly useful if you want to analyse the followers of influential accounts. By matching up who-follows-who, you can very quickly establish an almost database-like template of which profiles are connected.
What about you?
What are your favourite Twitter tools, tips, searches and tricks for seeking out social influencers?