Using Followerwonk to Research Targeted Audiences for Content
I have said it many times before and I will say it again, sometimes coming up with topics to write about for your targeted audiences is really difficult. Some times you run out of things to say or you have attempted various marketing strategies and failed in regards to engagement, reaching audiences, conversion, etc.
The bottom line is you need to watch your targeted audiences and try to determine their interests, needs and wants. You need to meet needs, offer solutions, satisfy wants, find ways to engage and potentially convert.
Using Social for Research
Social networks are a great way to watch targeted audiences and their conversations. You can see what your audiences enjoy, need, complain about, and you can really see their feelings about various topics.
You might think it is easy to watch your audiences because you can just watch your followers, right? Kind of; you can do this, but you need to know about those that don’t know who you are yet as well.
I am going to explain how you can use one free tool to really dig deeper into your target audiences. With this information you can collect a lot of data for content purposes and marketing purposes.
Using Followerwonk for Research
Followerwonk is a free tool that can provide you with an amazing amount of data by analyzing your followers and their followers. BUT, there is another great way to use this tool.
Sign up for the free tool and then you will see the first tab says “Search Twitter Bios”. Here you can enter any keyword or demographic and get a lot of information. Here is an example:
I searched for “new moms” and you can see that there were many results. What I want you to notice is that I get location data (awesome) and exact results for my query. The first person my not be my targeted audience, but the second person is.
So, I now have someone on Twitter to check out and see what “mom-like” discussions she may have, what comments she makes about being a mom and I could gather data also. You want to find more than one person of course because you need to discover topics and common themes.
You Made Choices; Do Your Targets Have An Audience?
So let’s say you use this tool and find some folks, but you don’t know if they really active on Twitter and if they even have relationships or an audience to communicate with. Well, Followerwonk can give you some data in regards to this. Let’s look at Cheryl P. / @che from above example:
Cheryl P. has over 298K followers, more than Chelsea Clinton. Impressive. She also doesn’t follow a lot of people, so this can tell you that she has a solid reputation and hasn’t just exchanged follows to inflate her follower numbers. She most likely offers something of value.
When I clicked on her name I saw several tweets about her daughter @SweetP, and there is some data there to collect if I was targeting this person/audience.
With Followerwonk you can research, collect people to follow, observe and then gather data. You can also examine their audiences to see if they might have some great info for you as well.
High Follower Numbers Isn’t Key
Celebs and prominent people in the news have a ton of followers, 500K – millions. Your targeted audiences most likely are not people like this. You want to look for people that match your target demographics in regards to location, gender, income and relevance to topics.
Twitter users with 200 followers may have the best info for you.
Tips
If you find some people that really match your target demographics and their conversations provide great data make sure to check their blogs and other social networks for additional data and information. If there comes a time that you need to reach out to some of these people for marketing purposes the more you know about them the better. You can’t approach people without having a clue who they are.
Remember your overall goal, gather data that can help you reach your targeted audiences.
Melissa Fach has been in the SEO industry since 2007. She created her own agency, was the Managing Editor at SEJ, worked as an editor for Moz with their community team, she worked at Pubcon as the Community Manager for 5 years, and is an editor for SEMrush US Blog.
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