Quick Way to Find Interesting & Influential Twitter Users

Filed in Featured, MY BEST POSTS, Social Media by Matt McGee on January 24, 2011 9 Comments

twitter-cupOne of the tenets of marketing on Twitter is to find and connect with the most influential users in your industry. There are several sites and directories that claim to offer an easy way to find those users. But, in my experience, none those sites/tools alone is adequate to really find who you should be following. But, if you use a couple of them together, you may have better luck in finding who the real influencers are in your niche/industry.

Finding Influential People on Twitter

Here’s a quick way to identify Twitter accounts that might be worth following using two tools: WeFollow.com and Klout.com.

1. Start at WeFollow.com

Begin by typing your industry keyword(s) into the search box on WeFollow.com. That will give you list of users listed by influence (as WeFollow defines it), and the option to see the same list sorted by most followers.

For example, if you search for “seo,” WeFollow will show you a list of some excellent Twitter accounts in the SEO industry. (Note: WeFollow only shows users who’ve added themselves to the directory, so your industry may not be as active as SEO folks are in listing themselves.)

wefollow-1

Jot down the Twitter usernames of the top 5 or 10 users (or more if you have time/desire to dig deeper).

2. Go to Klout.com

When you have your list of usernames from WeFollow.com, go to Klout.com and put each one of them into the search box, one at a time. Klout is a site that claims to measure Twitter influence; I don’t agree exactly with how it does that, but it can still provide some value.

Using the same “seo” example, if you search for WeFollow’s first name (above), you’ll reach Matt Cutts’ Klout page. The interesting part isn’t necessarily the numbers and measurements, it’s the part about halfway down the page where it shows you who Matt is influenced by, like this:

klout-cutts

You can see immediately that Danny Sullivan’s name shows up in both screenshots, so that’s a good sign that Danny is an influential and important SEO-related Twitter user. (Disclaimer: I work with Danny at Search Engine Land and Sphinn.) But you can also see several other users who influence an influential user. That’s a nice combination.

Do that with about 5-10 names from the original WeFollow list, and you’ve got a good start on identifying some of the most important and influential Twitter users in your industry. There’ll probably be some overlap, some names that show up multiple times — but you should still be able to identify 20 or more quality Twitter users.

An Important Caveat

I’d be careful about measuring/considering Twitter accounts that have a zillion followers and also follow a zillion people in return. Accounts like this often get tagged as influential because of how many followers they have, but in some cases, those aren’t “natural” followers; they might have been acquired via various exchanges/platforms that offer reciprocal following.

Ultimately, the gross number of followers that a Twitter user has isn’t a true measure of that person’s influence. But using the technique above, you can learn who influences the influencers — and that’s often a good measure.

Comments (9)

Trackback URL | Comments RSS Feed

  1. Gail Gardner says:

    Hi Matt,

    Have you seen @PeerIndex yet? It is similar to @Klout but with very interesting and useful detail.

    [Disclaimer: I have no relationship to either of these companies other than I use them both because I find them valuable and thought you might be interested in this new offering.]

  2. Sebastian says:

    Topsy’s expert search is another source:
    http://topsy.com/s/SEO/expert
    Here’s how they calculate influence:
    http://corp.topsy.com/about/influence/

  3. Great tips to find influencers and important people in your industry on Twitter. These are useful tools and as you mentioned, work best when used together. This is a great strategy for businesses looking to connect with like-minded individuals and companies.

  4. Chris Lavery says:

    I think WeFollow is great and most definately one of the best tools around. Klout is great to and I have met Joe Fernandez at one of his seminars and he is a top bloke. Does anybody know a tool that will find influential people in a specific industry but also in a specific location aswell? For example, the most influential SEO people in Orlando.

  5. Very slick how you use these two tools to find the people behind the curtain so to speak. I look forward to implementing this so I can find the sources in certain industries.

  6. Stacey says:

    I also use Twellow. I have found some great lawyers to follow that way.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *