SocialRank for Connecting with Fans

Over the past two months we’ve been highlighting ways that individuals, brands, and agencies can use SocialRank. The use cases range from business travel and recruiting to politicians and local events.

Today we are going to talk about using SocialRank for connecting with fans. Musicians getting diehards backstage for VIP access. Authors inviting readers to stops on their book tour. Any profession that accumulates fans will find SocialRank useful for facilitating meaningful and authentic interactions.

Here are a few ways to approach using SocialRank for connecting with fans. (If you want to skip all this and just see real-life examples, click here or scroll to the bottom).

Finding your most engaged fans

The most obvious way to connect with fans on SocialRank is by identifying your most engaged fans. Sorting your followers by “Most Engaged” will return a list of followers who have engaged with you at some point in the past 7 days (through retweets, mentions, and replies on Twitter and hearts, comments, and tags on Instagram).

Once you have your followers list sorted by “Most Engaged,” maybe you’re interested in specifying just those who are located in Chicago, where the next stop on your book tour is. To figure out who these Chicago-based fans are, use the Location filter to fine-tune this list even further.

Finding your fans with the biggest audience

Another way to use SocialRank to connect with fans is to reach out to followers who have huge audiences themselves. You can do this by sorting by “Most Valuable” or by “Most Followed”. To really hone in those who are “public figures” in their own right, activate the Verified filter to only display verified accounts. Note: Verified filter only applies to Twitter.

What’s the logic behind this? If you want news of your next gig at Webster Hall to diffuse effectively through Twitter and Instagram, it’s useful to reach out to valuable followers. These fans can help you spread the word by letting their own followers know about the show. This tactic works well in amplifying the message when coupled with a strong marketing campaign through your own channels.

You found your followers. Now what?

Next steps from here generally break down into two paths — digital or in-person. Let’s walk through both.

Digital

This approach is the easiest and most scalable way to interact with the followers you identified in the steps above. This could be as simple as prioritizing whom to engage with on a day-to-day basis (via favorites/RTs/replies/mentions/tags).

A second, more time-intensive digital strategy is to set up digital video chats, Q&As (like reddit’s AMA), and community account takeovers (for brands or individuals). A digital connection is the new autograph, so get signing.

In-Person

This approach brings your digital footprint and gives it some real-world heft. In-person engagement is still the most authentic way to connect with your audience (duh). You can do everything from local surprise-and-delight campaigns, invitations to premieres/screenings, backstage passes, meet-and-greets, and studio sessions.

There are a lot of creative ways to blend digital and in-real-life strategies and engage your audience. Used effectively, they’ll go a long way to energize your core fanbase, as well as attract new fans.

Use Cases

That’s enough of us telling you what this would hypothetically look like. Let’s show you what people have already been doing to leverage SocialRank to engage with their audiences.

Christina Perri
In April and May, musician Christina Perri and her team found highly engaged followers on Instagram, publicly rewarding them with special treats. The results were fantastic.

https://instagram.com/p/3cgVJvy3LH/

Kevin Spacey

Kevin Spacey’s team recently used SocialRank to find a Napa-based fan on Twitter to invite to a concert Kevin was putting together.

Muhammad Ali
Muhammad Ali’s team used SocialRank to find three fans on Instagram and sent them some sweet Under Armour-branded Muhammad Ali tees. You can see in the comments how many people asked where they could buy these shirts.

We’re always hunting for interesting ways people have been using Twitter and Instagram to energize their audiences. If you have any other suggestions on how this can be done, please hit us up at hi@socialrank.com!