Feature Update: Mainline Advanced Search To Find Influencers & Competitors For Your Content Strategy
Knowing who has an authentic following and gets real engagement on their content is one of the most important upstream decisions you can make for the success of all your marketing campaigns.
Using Mainline’s advanced search features allows you to find the right industry leaders with authentic engagement so you can be confident you’re getting alpha on conversations that actually matter to your target audience.
You’ll also find the best influencers for your next campaign, including the micro-influencers that cost a fraction of the price and are often willing to do far more to ensure success.
This comprehensive guide will show you how to effectively search our database of over 1.5 billion accounts and filter KOLs, competitors, and key industry accounts to ensure your content strategy and influencer campaigns give you a high return on your efforts.
This guide is designed to help you understand our advanced search features while also giving you a practical guide to using the search and filter functions to find high-quality accounts for your list. We recommend reading this once all the way through. Then re-read this while following along with your own searches.
This guide will show you how to use Mainline’s advanced search to find the Hidden Gems in your industry. If you haven’t already, read The 3 Lists You Need To Get Industry Alpha With Mainline.
Mainline’s Advanced Twitter Bio Search
Search 1.5 billion Twitter bios in seconds.
Nearly every account packs their bio with keywords directly related to what they tweet about or topics they’re interested in. This allows you to search for the topics and keywords most relevant to your industry, product, or audience to find perfect accounts to add to your campaign lists.
You can use the search function (yellow box above) in two main ways:
- Broad industry keywords to better understand market segments.
- Hyperspecific AND/OR/NOT searches to discover the hidden gem accounts in your industry.
You can also quickly filter out different follower ranges (blue box above) depending on if you’re looking for micro-influencers to promote your project or the big names in your industry.
Use Broad Keywords To Research Your Industry/Niche
We recommend starting with broad keywords common in your industry. This allows you to quickly scan through user bios to better understand how influencers describe themselves.
You could start with keywords such as web3, crypto, and blockchain. Then filter the results by follower count, quality score, and influence score (more on those later) to understand how these different accounts describe themselves.
Here are a few bios examples when doing a broad search for Crypto.
- Filipino Crypto Influencer Trader since 2014 — NFT, Web3, Defi — Want passive income from your Bitcoin? Check my site.
- Veteran Owned Media Booking and PR Agency working with brands/influencers in: 🏀Sports 🎥Entertainment 👩💻Tech 💻 Business💰& Crypto
- TV Personality | 90 Day Fiance Pillow Talk | $CRYPTO Enthusiast | Influencer | YouTuber | CEO GringoGuns | SecondLifeVentures
- Alpha Group owner🐵 • Selling out💯 • 5 Years NFT & Crypto🚀 • Investor • NFT Influencer • #BigAlphaWins
- Crypto currency INFLUENCER and promoter Low cap gems 💎 & 100X gems 💎#DM me for promotion #BSCGem #ERCgem #metaVerse #NFTpromoter $GHC $AVN #Voting #TRXMining
A very powerful feature of Mainline’s bio search is your ability to stumble across new keywords you may have never thought to target. YouTuber appears quite a few times in this search. You could refine your search to include YouTube and now find influencers who will promote your project on Twitter and YouTube, opening up a new audience segment. Adding, Twitch, TikTok, or other social platforms would likely find similar results.
Another great find is “Filipino Crypto Influencer” finding community leaders for countries or regions you want to expand into can be a huge opportunity for a more global presence. Now you might try some searches that include Chinese, Indian, Brazil, South Africa, or any other country you want to target specifically for your campaign.
Use Operators To Find Hyperspecific Accounts
Layering on different search operators (AND/OR/NOT)will narrow your list to find the top influencers or KOLs in specific subcategories of your industry.
If you’re a project gearing up for an NFT launch, you might try a search for (crypto OR web3 or Blockchain) AND NFT AND (influencer).
Using the OR operator within parentheses returns results that have any of those words in the bio. Using the AND operator means they must have all those words in their bio.
The above search would return a bio that has “web3 NFT influencer,” “crypto blockchain NFT influencer,” or “blockchain nft influencer,” but it would not return a bio with “web3 blockchain influencer.”
You might also find using a negative keyword to be beneficial to filter out low-quality accounts. You would use the NOT operator.
Find Quality Accounts With Advanced Filtering
Follower count is a very misleading number and should always be taken with a grain of salt because not all followers are created equal. This is why we created three scoring algorithms to uncover the truth about an account’s following.
- Follower Quality Score: This measures how prominent an account’s followers are. The higher the rating means they have bigger and more prominent accounts following them.
IE Many of their followers are verified or have many followers. Accounts with a high percentage of followers with 10 or fewer followers will receive lower scores, as this is often associated with coordinated engagement farms. - Influence Score: This score represents the breadth of an account’s network. Follower quality is one factor, but this score also considers several other follower metrics. We look for a wide range of follower account creation dates and posting activity of those followers.
A high score indicates the account reaches a broader audience (i.e., transcends social, political, and economic arenas) and has a range of average and prominent accounts following them. - Coordinated Followers: This score analyzes the percentage of an account’s followers that are likely controlled by a single entity. This score considers the number of followers created on the same day or have very similar activity levels on Twitter.
Currently, this is a conservative score, only considering accounts that are 4 standard deviations from the mean.
These scores will help you filter influencers into different lists to guide your content strategy or next KOL campaign. These scores are not meant to be an indictment of any account. They are here to help give a clearer picture of who their followers are.
Click here for a full explanation of our quality and scoring algorithms.
How To Use Mainline’s Quality Filters To Find The Right Accounts
Adding the right accounts to your lists is critical, do not rush through this process.
Start your search with broad industry keywords and then filter only A and B quality scores. Then add follower count filters for different ranges and sort by those with the highest influence first.
Add quality accounts to your Hidden Gems list during your broad keyword search. We also recommend writing down bio keywords for more advanced searches later.
Remember, influencers in different follower ranges are useful for different areas of a marketing campaign or content research, so don’t just search for those with the biggest followings. The smaller accounts often have better relationships with their audience, and you can find some gold in their replies.
Once you’ve collected a good list of keywords to expand and refine your search, start experimenting with different AND/OR combinations to discover hidden influencers in your niche. Spend at least twice as much time with these searches if you want to find the best influencers and content.
The riches are in the niches.
Finding influencers that speak to a very specific group of people will often yield better results than big broad influencers. When an influencer focuses on someone specific, they often have a very deep understanding of that community and can build a deeper level of trust. Their content will often be much better because they can speak to one audience very well.
Remember to look at all scores as a comparison within your current search. Accounts with smaller followings will likely have a lower influence score across the board. Find the ones with the highest score in that range.
The same is true for the coordination score. Accounts with very large followings will likely have more coordinated followers. That doesn’t necessarily mean they’re bad or should be thrown out immediately. Find the ones with the lowest scores in that search.
We recommend adding more accounts to your list than you think you need because you’ll find some influencers are no longer active or post infrequently these days. This is another reason why you should keep an eye out for accounts in the 10–50k follower range. They’re still building their audience and likely putting more effort into growing and will be more active.
If you have any accounts that don’t have a score, click the little circle clock to run a follower audit. They’ll be added to a list called “Your Follower Audits,” where you can check back later to see if they’re worth adding to your list.
You can easily access Your Follower audits by clicking your profile picture in the top right.
Our follower audits are comprehensive and check every follower of that account, so larger accounts may take longer to complete the audit.
Accounts will only show a coordinated follower score if they’ve had an engagement audit run on them. If you don’t see a coordinated follower score, add them to your list as long as their quality and influence scores look good, and an engagement score will automatically be run later.
Next Steps…
Once you’ve finished compiling your list of hidden gems, it’s time to go back and check your first two core lists and analyze those for conversation and audience alpha.
