The Perfect Twitter User To Target
…because you want fans not just numbers.
originally posted on the Mokumax blog here…
When building the friend engine for Mokumax we learned a lot. There was a lot of trial and error. It took awhile but eventually we narrowed down the criteria for finding the best Twitter users.
One of the problems with Twitter is that it is full of auto-bot users or fake accounts. It’s been estimated that 5% of all Twitter accounts are fake. The point is that fake accounts definitely exist and have tweets posted all day — every day. You want to avoid those accounts.
To clarify, I’m not saying that automation is bad for Twitter. It’s absolutely necessary unless you can pay full-time employees to manage your Twitter accounts. Mokumax automates a lot of the mundane tedious tasks of marketing your message on Twitter.
Is the Twitter user account a fake?
There are a few things you can check when determining if the Twitter user is a fake account. First check their Twitter bio. A lot of the bios of fake accounts will include a number or some randomly generated string of letters as the username. Ask yourself, would a person really pick this as their username?
Look at their followers and friends list as well. If you see a lot of eggs for profile pictures then you guessed it… it’s probably fake. The fake accounts have evolved quite a bit however. Many are ripping profile images from legit users and stealing tweets. They just add some random text and then tweet the same thing.
After you’ve determined that the Twitter user isn’t a fake account it’s time to see if the user is even worth following. The goal is to connect with the Twitter user and hopefully make them a customer or user of your product. In other words, you want a new follower to connect with.
Friend to Follower ratio should be .67 or above.
Check the user’s follower and friend count. We have found that you are very unlikely to get a new follower for anything below a 67% friend-to-follower ratio. In other words, if you divide the friends by the number of followers the result should be .67 or above.
Post count needs to be 100+
You want a user that interacts with Twitter. Granted there could be automation involved. That’s fine too. Only consider Twitter users that have posted at least 100 tweets.
Check the Twitter user’s bio for your target keywords
The perfect Twitter user to target is going to be different depending on your business or goal. To keep our list lean pick one or two keywords that relate to you or your business. Search the Twitter bio of the potential lead. If it’s there then keep the user on the short list. This is another opportunity to weed out the fake Twitter user accounts.
Does language matter? Who are you targeting?
Again this depends on your specific goals. If you are bilingual and want to reach all languages then ignore this step. If your target audience is English speaking Twitter users then check this as well. The Twitter API makes this step a bit easier for us in BlackBox. The language setting is not required by Twitter so it may or may not be available for each user.
If your user is still on the list at this point then follow them immediately. They are very likely to follow back and interact with you.
If you want to make this automatic you should check out the BlackBox solution. You can setup multiple campaigns with multiple keywords. Following and unfollowing is automatic and your hot leads are organized in a list for easy management.
It’s a lot of work to find targeted leads on Twitter but you can simplify the process by adding some automation to the mix.
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Thanks for reading!
Craig
