Building and analyzing social accounts is a must for SEOs. In this week's Whiteboard Friday, Rand discusses the newest free product for SEOmoz PRO members: Followerwonk! This splendid tool is a great way for SEOs to manage their social accounts through linkbuilding, outreach, adding value to campaigns, growing a social media presence, and more.
Based on four key sections of the Followerwonk site, you'll learn how to search inside Followerwonk for specific users, compare your users for overlaps in follows and followers, analyze your followers for details and stats, and track your followers for wins and losses. Analyzing your social accounts has never been so easy - and so fun!
Howdy, SEOmoz fans! Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're going to talk a little bit about Followerwonk.
Now, for those of you who don't know, SEOmoz recently acquired Followerwonk. It's now a completely free product for PRO users. So if you're a SEOmoz Pro customer, you literally just go over to Followerwonk, connect your SEOmoz account, log in with Twitter if you haven't already connected a Twitter account, and boom, you're good to go. You get Followerwonk free. We're very excited about this.
I've loved Followerwonk for a long time, kind of wanted to do a Whiteboard Friday about all the cool ways that I use it, and all the cool ways that SEOs can use it to do magical stuff with their social accounts on link building and outreach and all that kind of stuff, but I figured hey, let's wait until it's free for you. So, here you go. Now Followerwonk, totally free, you can use it any time you want.
So I've got four tips, and this is based on four different sections of Wonk. So if you go to the Followerwonk product, you'll see four tabs that look like this: Search, Compare, Analyze, and Track. Those four tabs, there's actually a fifth tab that I'm not going to mention today, but you can go check it out, too.
Number one, the first one, is the Bio Search feature. Now, this is very cool for sort of outreach and discovery. If you think of Open Site Explorer as a look into the link graph of the Web, the bio search inside Followerwonk is really a look into the Tweet graph or the Twitter user graph of Twitter.
So I can go and I can do things like outreach, look for journalists or bloggers, influencers in a specific niche, etc., just by searching the words in here. A warning though, you've got to be pretty literal. So I would do a couple of things. I would first click on the More Options. There's a More Options link right below the search box. If you click that link, it'll drop down another box that shows you a bunch of other options. Get creative in there. Start searching for synonyms. Someone might call themselves a journalist, a reporter, a writer, an investigator, whatever it is, and you want to be making sure that you're using all those different combinations.
Same is true for location stuff. So some people, they'll say they're in Dublin, they'll say they're in Ireland, they'll say they're in Southern Ireland, they'll say they're in some weird combination of phrases. Sometimes people will use SEA to describe Seattle. Fine, great. So you just need to be creative when you're plugging those terms in here.
You can also use it for geo-targeting, so find folks to connect with. If you're going to a city, you're going to an event somewhere, you're visiting somewhere, and you know hey, let me just see if there are influential people in my sphere. So if you're in the paper goods industry and you want to see if there's a big letterpress person, a big engraver person, a big craft artist who happens to be in Philadelphia or Pittsburgh or Austin, Texas, wherever you're going, you can use that Bio Search to find those people, start tweeting back and forth. "Hey @soandso, I'm visiting next week. Any recommendations?" You often get great replies and can build great connections out of that.
Events and interests, so this is another way to use this. If you're going to be at a specific event, even an online event, a webinar, or you're going to participate in a Twitter chat or something like that, you can look for the people who have those hashtags and who are in a location or in a specific field. So if I'm going to Dublin, for example, later this month, I might search for SEOs who happen to be in Dublin, and I can see if I can connect with those folks, get them to come to an event that I'm going to be speaking at while I'm there, those kinds of things. You can really use this to figure out who are the influencers in a specific industry or at a conference or meet-up.
Number two: Compare Users. This has got to be one of my favorite features, and the reason is really simple. When you think about doing link outreach, one of the most powerful ways and things that people do is use the SEOmoz link intersect tool, and they use it to go, "Who is linking to two or more of my competitors, but not to me?" Magical. You can do that with Followerwonk on Twitter.
If you go to the Compare Users tab, you can only do it for two at a time, but it still works really well and it's very fast. So I can go, "Oh, hey, I want to see who's following Joel and who's following Karen, who is not following me." And that's exactly what this point of intersect in the little Followerwonk Venn diagram does. If I look at those, there's a list on the side, I can actually click and see the list of users, sort them by influence, sort them by follower count, sort them by a ratio, whatever I want to sort them by. I can even download in Excel that group if I want, and then import and play around with it and do my pivot tables, whatever you want to do. This is an awesome way for discovering those likely influential followers of your topic area, who are interested in things you're interested in and follow multiple competitors. If they follow one of your competitors, they might just be a fan of them. If they follow two or more, chances are they're a subject matter expert or subject matter interested person, and that means they're a great potential target for outreach, for influence. You know that you want to probably reach that group, particularly the ones who have lots of followers.
Number three: the Analyze Followers. Oh, I don't know. Tough call as to whether this is my favorite feature or this one. For you, for your own account, what I recommend is plugging it into the Analyze Followers. So I'd plug in @randfish, you plug in your account name, and it'll show you all sorts of things. If you scroll to the bottom of that list, there's tons of stuff. So there's geo-data, and there's tweet and re-tweet data, and there's the distribution of the influencers of your followers, and all sorts of other cool stuff. But one of my favorite ones is this little graph right here. It basically shows times of day. So this'll be 12:00 a.m. or whatever, and this will be 12:00 p.m. here, and that's 11:00 p.m. down here, and it'll show me what time my followers are online and what percentage of them are online.
The coolest part about this is if you look at the top, the highest bar on there, what you'll most likely see is something under 10%. What this means is that people who are on Twitter, of your followers who are on Twitter, less than 10% for me it's 6.5% of my followers maximum are on Twitter, using Twitter at any given time. So if I tweet a link, unless someone's going back through and looking at all their tweets and my account specifically, the maximum number of people that I'm going to reach is less than 3,000, because I have 60,000-ish followers. So 5% of that would be around 3,000. Crap! You know what this tells me? This tells me I really, really, really should be sharing not just at this time of day, but probably at least once or twice more if I have an important link to share.
So I put up a new blog post pretty much every night on Moz.com/rand, my new blog, and I share late, late at night. In fact, I share right there, at probably the worst possible time I could share, because that's when I'm up, and I go to sleep around 1:00 or 2:00 am, and I don't get enough sleep. I should probably change that. But I share here. I need to share again in the morning Pacific time, because that's when the most, the highest number of my followers. And I could probably do with sharing again the next afternoon, without much overlap. There are very few people who are going to be online all three of those times. Sharing twice or three times saying,
"Hey, here's my post from last night in case you missed it," that kind of a thing, which I do almost every morning, this is a very, very excellent idea. And then this graph will show you exactly when to do that. Super smart, really, really cool.
For other accounts, I would also recommend that you plug in some other folks and analyze, particularly folks in your industry or folks who are influencers or journalists or whoever it is that you think you want to have some overlap with, find who their most influential followers are. So this could be a competitor. It could be a reporter in your space. It could be someone who's just a very powerful blogger, and whether they're a right target, because the list of data that you'll see will show you a lot of information about who's following them from a demographic and psychographic perspective and a tweet-likelihood perspective, and a influencer perspective. Sometimes clicking on that list of high influencers, of followers of them, that have a lot of influential followers and seeing who those people are, those can also turn into great targets to connect with.
Last thing: the Track Followers account. My favorite part of this particular feature is that it shows me a timeline of new followers and lost followers. So basically, what I'm seeing up here is I gained +100 new followers on this day. Well, what did I do that day? And I can click and actually see who are those followers. I can click over to my Twitter account and see what was I tweeting that day. This is a great, great way to see, "Am I doing a good job of engaging? Is it when I tweet a lot, or when I tweet a little? Or when I get a lot of re-tweets? Or when I share a particular link? What am I doing that's getting me there?"
In fact, I had a fascinating example recently. This past week, actually when you're watching this, this will be two weeks ago, I was in Boston for the Inbound Conference from HubSpot, and I spoke to a big audience there. There were almost 2,000 people in the audience I think like 2,800 attendees, so big audience. I do a keynote session on some SEO stuff, and this is what happened. I basically had my highest growth day that I've had in almost three months - well, I had a big day when we got some funding too
- but this was like +390 some odd followers that joined that day and started following me. And I had a bunch a followers the next day, and that same time, I got verified by Twitter. Twitter sent me and email saying,
"Oh, hey, we'd like to verify your account."
So kind of a fascinating thing and this actually keeps track of who those people are and what happens so I can see and I can try and track down, "Was it really me doing the HubSpot conference, or was it something else?" It probably was the Inbound Conference, but this is a fascinating thing. I can do this same thing on the other side and look at, "Why did I lose so many followers here? What did I tweet?"
By the way, almost every time I lose a bunch of followers, it's one of two things: I tweeted something relatively political, and I mean political not just in the sense of like American politics and national politics, but also political in terms of black-hat/white-hat, and SEO spammers versus the good guys in SEO, that kind of stuff. That can lose me quite a few followers. And then the other reason that I lose a lot of followers that I've seen is when Twitter does a big spam clear out. So clear out a ton of spam accounts and that'll drop my follower account.
So it's fascinating to watch this stuff. All four of these are just great reasons to be using Followerwonk. If you've got an SEOmoz Pro account, you should go check this out. Even if you don't, a lot of these features are free. You can use them for the first time for free, so I would encourage you to do it. You'll get a ton of value out of Wonk. In terms of Twitter and adding value to your SEO campaigns and growing your social media presence and the reach of your links, there's nothing like this. So that's why I was so excited to acquire them.
If you have great suggestions for Followerwonk, things that you want to see, please leave them down in the comments. We would love that.
Thanks very much everyone. We'll see you again next time for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.
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