Twitter for Dummies - Laura Fitton [73]
Diversifying your network
You can help guide who tends to follow you by talking about a myriad of topics. People aren’t one-dimensional, and no one really expects you to be on-point all the time. Although you may have interests that you talk about more than others, getting a sense of what you’re talking about and whom you’re talking to can come in handy — it enables you to target your tweets to topics that are most interesting to your followers.
One of our favorite tools for understanding how often and what you’re updating is TweetStats (www.tweetstats.com). This tool enables you to see who you’re talking to, when you’re talking, and what you’re talking about — all in graph form. Figure 10-2 shows an example of the type of information TweetStats reports.
Figure 10-2: You can see a graph of your tweet density.
Targeting specific networks
If you’re targeting specific people with whom you want to interact more regularly, find a way to add value to the interactions for them. You can target these types of people by searching keywords and hashtags for that topic and seeing who uses them and who the real leaders appear to be. Once you’re following a few key people within that interest area, look for whom they talk to, listen to, and value. For example, if you’re a gardener, check to see who Martha Stewart (@MarthaStewart) follows and talks to about gardening topics. Click through any appealing @replies and consider following those people. You can also use this information to get a sense of what’s important to any given twitterer and what types of information they like to receive. With Twitter, you can essentially browse not only the connections between people, but also between topics of interest. You can also easily drop into active ongoing conversations about specific themes. One or two key people can lead you to an entire subject matter landscape on Twitter.
In a very real sense, an individual or Twitter account that represents something can become the foundation for a community. Likewise, if you’re trying to target a specific type of individual, go to the Twitter streams of those individuals and see what they’re tweeting about. Join the conversation that they’re having with other people and engage those other people, as well. Over time, if you’re adding value to that conversation, then other people look to you as a person who’s involved and relevant in that community, whether it’s computer programming, baking cupcakes, or cancer research.
Measuring influence
While you start to gain a foothold within communities on Twitter, you might want to get a sense of what your network looks like and how far your updates travel.
As you read, please bear in mind that some of the less measurable results are the most important. The most important thing to measure is the thing you’re actually trying to accomplish, not just numbers for numbers’ sake. Are you meeting new friends? Finding new business leads? Sharing information widely about issues important to you?
Do your messages spread? In her keynotes, Laura argues that messages can be much more important influencers within Twitter than influential accounts and individuals, because good messages get repeated. A truly great message, even if it starts in quiet little corners of Twitter among people with small following networks, will echo and get repeated until eventually it reaches much of the network.
Twitter itself has a very primitive way of measuring your reach: You have following and followers counts. Although those numbers would seem to provide a good baseline for understanding how far your updates go and to whom, they don’t say much about what types of people follow you and how influential those followers are. In response, the Twitter community has developed