The 3 Lists You Need To Get Industry Alpha With Mainline

The quality of your inputs is the biggest upstream decision you’ll make that determines whether you can build an engaged community that can’t wait for your next Tweet or if your conversations fall on deaf ears.

Choosing the wrong accounts will kill any chance of building a thriving community. Mainline allows you to find and eliminate the accounts trying to game the system while finding the hidden gems commanding your customers' attention that your competitors don’t know about.

We recommend starting with three core lists to get the conversation alpha in your industry. This will drive 80% of your community growth and engagement.

1. Competitors & Complimentors
2. Known Thought Leaders (in your industry/niche)
3. The Hidden Gems

Competitors & Complimentors (C&C List)

The easiest way to get used to Mainline’s workflow is to create a list of your competitors and complementary businesses. It’s an easy two-step process in your C&C Campaign List.

Known competitors are any businesses that your customers could use instead of you.

Complimentary businesses solve other problems your customers might have in your industry. For example, companies like North Face and Patagonia would be complimentary businesses if you’re an e-commerce store with camping equipment (but not clothing).

Playstation or Xbox would be complimentary businesses if you're a video game company.

Email service providers or Shopify add-on apps would be complimentary businesses if you teach people how to grow a Shopify store.

Adding Accounts To Your C&C List

You should already have a pretty good idea of who your competitors and complimentors are, so all you need to do is grab their Twitter handles and add them to the list.

1. Click Add Users in the top right corner.
2. Paste the Twitter handles of your competitors and complementary businesses. Make sure to include the @ and separate each account with a comma or simply click add after pasting in a single account.

Once you’re finished adding all the accounts to your list, click the reports and audits you’d like to run in their corresponding widgets and our system will begin analyzing all their engagement metrics while you create your next two lists.

Known Thought Leaders (KTL List)

Similar to your Competitor & Complimentors list, this list will comprise the big names in your space that drive many conversations. You should already have a pretty good idea of who these people are because they will be considered industry celebrities and will likely have 200k+ followers, sometimes into the millions.

Think of journalists, prominent CEOs, and founders of the major companies in your space, individuals who have achieved the highest levels of success, professors, etc.

Again, since you should have a pretty good idea of these key figures in your industry, you’ll follow the same process above: going to your KTL list, clicking the add users in the top right, then adding their handles in the popup box.

We recommend keeping this list to 10 accounts.

Thought Leaders That Are Competitors…

Remember that thought leaders can be owners, CEOs, or founders of competitor businesses. Often times their personal account will be somewhat detached from their business account, so make sure to keep them in separate lists. Think of Elon Musk vs. Tesla or SpaceX accounts.

You want to keep these separate because social media is often more interested in the person than the brand, so comparing the metrics of an individual thought leader with those of a business can skew your results.

It’s important to know what business-focused conversations are getting engagement, even if that engagement is less than that of a thought leader overall. Growing your own community will require a combination of business updates and important industry conversations that aren’t specifically related to your core business.

Your customers want to know that you have a pulse on the industry and can share valuable content that will help them, even if they haven’t bought your product or service yet.

Hidden Gems List

The hidden gems list is where the true power of Mainline shines. You can search the bios of over 1.5 billion Twitter accounts to find niche influencers that your competitors don't know.

The best and worst part of social media is that their algorithms are designed to show you more of the accounts and content they think you’d be interested in. While effective for keeping you scrolling on Twitter, it makes finding specific influencers difficult.

Mainline gives you full control of your search by allowing advanced keyword combinations using AND/OR/NOT search functions that allow you to find the exact accounts you want without bias.

This allows you to find the hidden gems in your niche, like micro influencers or up-and-coming thought leaders who might have attracted the attention of your key customer segments but haven’t quite gotten big enough to reach industry celebrity status.

Hidden Benefits Of Micro-Influencers

Analyzing the conversations from these smaller (1k-10k followers) and mid-sized (10k-50k) accounts is that they’re more active and more clued into the real conversations your customers are having because they’re still trying to grow their influence.

They often reply more to their audience and create well-thought-out threads that can inspire your own content creation. You can find out a lot about the pain points of your audience by reading through the replies to their tweets. If you’ve read through the replies of large accounts, you’ll notice most are filled with noise and people just trying to get the influencer's attention.

We recommend focusing your Hidden Gems list on these up-and-coming accounts, keeping most of them under 200k followers. Typically once an account has over 200k, they would qualify as a Known Thought Leader in your industry and should be on that list. If you do discover an account like that during your Hidden Gems search, feel free to add it to your KTL list.

We recommend separating accounts above 200k followers because they often have more engagement than smaller accounts. This can skew the engagement numbers and cause you to miss out on key conversations from the smaller accounts.

Using Mainline’s quality filters, you can sort through the accounts with the highest influence and best networks in major follower ranges while searching for broad industry keywords or hyper-specific sub-niches using AND/OR/NOT combinations of terms.

Click here for a deep dive into the advanced Mainline Search.

Workflow And Additional Lists

We recommend starting your Alpha Content Analysis by creating your Competitors & Complimentors list, then your Known Thought Leaders list. These lists typically only have 10–20 accounts each (depending on your industry), so the Deep Engagement Audits will be completed much faster.

While you’re waiting for the Deep Engagement Audits to be finished on those lists, you can take your time finding the hidden gems in your industry. We recommend spending several hours on this list and really digging for the best accounts. It will make creating content much easier in the future.

The more accounts you add to this list in the beginning the better. You’ll often find that some accounts are no longer very active or the Deep Engagement Audits will uncover a higher degree of coordination than you’re comfortable with. This means your Hidden Gems list will often require removing some accounts so that only true gems remain.

Once your hidden gems list is finished, you’ll click the audits and reports you’d like our system to run, just like you did with your other two lists. While you wait for the results, your other lists should have been completed (accounts with millions of followers might take longer to finish), and you can begin analyzing the results of those lists.

Other lists to consider creating...

Once your three core lists are created, we highly recommend breaking your Hidden Gems list down based on follower count. One of the biggest things we’ve noticed after auditing almost 1 million Twitter accounts is that engagement metrics should be compared with accounts of a similar size and sub-topics in an industry.

For example, the Crypto and Web3 space has more low-quality accounts than many other industries. Likely due to the financial upside of creating Coordinated Engagement Networks to spam posts for whitelist spots or increase an influencer's follower count to get paid more for posts. Part of this can also be many new people joining Twitter because it’s the main platform for Crypto news and marketing.

Comparing a list of crypto influencers with a list of journalists who talk about the tech industry with a focus on web3 and crypto would be an unfair comparison. Both lists can have their purpose and benefits as crypto-native people will have different conversations than crypto-journalists.

We recommend avoiding accounts with 1M+ followers outside your Known Thought Leaders list. The engagement on these accounts will far surpass anyone else, so all other conversations would be hidden.

How you choose to break these lists apart will largely be a personal preference and dependent on how you think about creating content. An easy place to start is creating sub-lists by follower count ranges, network quality scores, or influence scores.

Recap & Final Thoughts

To avoid being overwhelmed by all of the influencers on Twitter, we recommend creating three core lists.

1. Competitors & Complimentors: Competitors solve the same problem your business does. Complimentors solve different problems that your audience faces. Keep this list to 10–20 accounts.
2. Known Thought Leaders: These are the industry celebrities with the biggest voice. Keep this list to 10 accounts.
3. Hidden Gems: These are the micro-influencers in your industry that have yet to be discovered but often have some of the most engaged audiences. Go crazy with this list. 100+ accounts are fine because you’ll likely filter some out and create sub-lists later.

Use Mainline’s advanced search to find the hidden gems in your industry so that you can get the true alpha on the best conversations. Micro-influencers are still trying to make a name for themselves and are putting in the effort to grow.

Once your lists are complete, consider creating sub-lists to further break down micro-influencers based on…

• Sub-niche
• Follower count
• Network Quality or Influence Scores

Once you’ve done that, it’s time to analyze their engagement audits to find the best audiences and conversations.