Twitter Influencers: Why You Need Them and How To Find Them
For everyday users like me, Twitter is that social media we go to when we need to know what’s happening when it’s happening. (Or when we have that sudden flash of witty inspiration and want to share it with our 200 followers.) However, for businesses and business owners, Twitter is one of the world’s largest marketplaces, with 330 million Monthly Active Users (MAUs).
Twitter offers several unique opportunities for businesses to advertise, market their products, engage with their customers, and provide customer support in real-time. It also allows brands to keep up with consumer trends. Most social media users prefer to engage with brands on Twitter. The platform’s text-based format makes it easy for consumers to air their opinions, which are the lifeblood of any business that hopes to survive.
One other significant opportunity for businesses on Twitter is influencer marketing. While all social media platforms have and make use of influencers, Twitter influencers give companies an advantage because it is easier to peruse their content and identify just what makes people listen to them. If you are looking get started promoting your business on Twitter, then you should definitely consider using influencers. Using influencers on Twitter gives you an affordable and efficient way to reach an audience without having to build an audience. However, there is a little problem. Combing through thousands of user-profiles and hundreds of thousands of tweets to identify who is an influencer and who isn’t might be a tad difficult. So you need a specialized method to identify the best people to partner with.
In this article, we’ll talk about why you should use Twitter influencers for marketing your business, how to find influencers on Twitter with web scraping, and the benefits of Twitter influencer marketing. Feel free to use the table of contents to skip to the section that most interests you.
Table of Contents
Why Do You Need Twitter Influencers?
Why do you need influencers in general? Influencer marketing uses well-known social media users in your industry as brand ambassadors to promote your products. According to research, 4 in 10 millennials say their favorite influencer understands them better than their friends. Also, 40% of consumers purchase something after seeing it on a social media platform. With the immense popularity that social media platforms have gained in the past few years, people depend more and more on popular online personalities’ opinions to make decisions, especially when making purchases. This means that the opinion of one random social media user can make people buy your products more or stop buying from you altogether.
On Twitter, a text-based platform, this nuance is even more pronounced. People are more likely to share their opinion on a brand or talk about their experience with a product on Twitter than on any other platform. Therefore, to successfully implement a viable marketing plan using Twitter, you have to integrate a method for aligning your content with the popular content in your industry as observed on the timeline of industry influencers and also make a plan to enlist the aid of influencers in marketing your business.
Twitter has one of the most authentic model of influencer marketing. Unlike platforms where a one-time boost in followers is enough to make a user an influencer and keep them there, Twitter’s algorithm ensures that only relevant posts that followers continually interact with are shown on the timeline. So for an influencer to stay an influencer on Twitter, they have to post relevant content continuously. This offers a unique opportunity to you as a business owner to keep up with the most pertinent opinions and news in your industry and keep up with recent additions to the industry that might be part of your target audience. Now that we know why you need to know the Twitter influencers in your industry, let’s talk about finding influencers on Twitter.
How To Find Twitter Influencers
When we talk about influencers, most people automatically assume that they are people with the most followers on their profiles. But this is not true. The true mark of an influencer is the level to which people engage with their tweets. A user with 10,000 followers who has 60% of his followers engaging with his tweets is a better influencer than a user with 20,000 followers who has only 10% of his followers engaging with his tweets. This makes it hard to correctly identify the right influencers to enlist in marketing your business. You can’t choose an influencer based on follower count alone; you need more data. And you need a good way to collect the data.
Every industry has its corner of Twitter, where its members hang out with its influencers. There’s tech Twitter, fashion Twitter, sports Twitter, business Twitter, even travel Twitter. Going through hundreds of thousands of tweets generated by each corner of Twitter to identify who has the highest engagements is not a task for the faint of heart. So you need a specialized method to find the best influencers in your industry. You can use several metrics to find influencers on Twitter: you can find Twitter influencers by topic, by industry, by follower count, by engagement, etc. However, all these metrics require you to slog through hundreds and thousands of tweets, profiles, and hashtags. You need a method that can collate all these metrics and use them to identify the right influencer for your business, and that’s where web scraping comes in.
Finding Twitter influencers with web scraping
If you decide to be bold (I’ll advise against it) and manually go through tweets to find the best influencers in your industry, then you are performing a version of web scraping (the version that will most likely leave you with a headache). The other version of web scraping (the better version) is the use of web scraping bots. Web scraping bots work at a macro level of data collection, parsing through the code (like HTML) of a given webpage to extract data according to some preset parameters. Using web scraping bots allow you to collect data in large volumes. Now, how does this relate to Twitter?
With web scraping bots, you can easily scrape tweets in your industry around a particular keyword. By doing this type of keyword research, you can easily see the tweets with the most engagements. When you observe a particular profile consistently getting high engagements on their tweets, then you know you have found an influencer. Using web scraping bots to collect influencer profiles allows you to target product-specific keywords, which means you can identify the best influencers to use in marketing each of your products.
Benefits of Twitter Influencer Marketing
Earlier, we talked about why you need Twitter influencers. Now let us look at the benefits of using influencers. There are several reasons why you should take advantage of influencer marketing on Twitter, but we’ll take a look at just three of them.
- Frees up your time: If you are running a one-person business where you are the CEO and the CMO at the same time, then using influencer marketing is going to save you a lot of time. When you use influencers, you don’t have to spend time building an audience, posting steady content, or any other administrative tasks you have to do to advertise on Twitter successfully. The influencer already has the audience and engagement. Once you are confident that their content aligns with your brand voice, you can enlist them to tell their audience about you and focus on other aspects of your business. However, this does not mean you should forgo building an audience by yourself.
- Better reach: If you already have an audience on Twitter but want to increase your reach, using influencers is your best bet. Influencers give you a targeted approach to your audience rather than the scatter-gun approach that you have had to use at one time or the other to reach your ideal customer amid the crowd of non-customers.
- Allows you to leverage social proof: People are increasingly placing more trust in strangers’ opinions online than their own thoughts. The unwritten motto for social media, especially among Millenials and Gen-Zer’s is “if an influencer says it, then it must be true.” On a platform like Twitter, where there is more of saying and less showing, this motto really holds. When influencers tweet their opinions, people form camps, supporting or opposing the opinion but never really expressing their own. This means you can leverage this motto to sell your products even to people who have never heard of you before. All you need to do is get the right influencer to tell them about you.
The Best Tool for Finding Influencers on Twitter
If you are looking for the best tool to get started with scraping data for influencer marketing on Twitter, then you’ve come to the right place. Using Scraping Robot as your web scraping tool allows you to collect all the data you need when you need it.
You can easily scrape data like popular industry keywords, tweets with the highest engagements, follower base of popular influencers, etc. To start scraping this data at scale, just send us a message telling us what you want, and we’ll get started creating your custom scraping solution for you.
All the data scraped is delivered to you in a CSV format for easy use. If you are into DIY and you’d like to try out our already-built modules by yourself for free, check out our modules page. When you sign up for any of our scraping modules, you get 5,000 free scrapes to scrape any website of your choice. If you choose to continue after using your free scrapes, every subsequent scrape costs only $0.0018. Our free modules give you a chance to get a taste of how easy it is to use our service.
All our web scraping modules use APIs to enable you to automate your web scraping process and collect data in real-time. We also use multiple proxies, allowing you to send an unlimited number of scraping requests simultaneously. If you’d like to learn more, you can try it out yourself.
Conclusion
Influencer marketing has really picked up speed in the past couple of years, and Twitter influencers have been right up at the front with the rest of the social media pack. If you are just starting or looking for more avenues to implement influencer marketing in your business, you should definitely consider Twitter. And if you are looking for the best way to collect influencer data and identify the right influencer for your business on Twitter, then send us a message today to start your custom scraping project at Scraping Robot. Cheers!
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