
September 17, 2013

Twtrland: Find your nonprofit’s top influencers

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NWF
NWF on Twitter: some of the social analytics firepower that Twtrland provides.

How to identify potential champions for your cause

Target audience: Nonprofits, cause organizations, foundations, NGOs, social enterprises, educators, journalists, Web publishers, Twitter users.

JD LasicaWhen I give my webinars on CharityHowTo, one of the questions that often comes up is: How do I get visibility for my organization’s website, blog or cause?

The answer is not to focus exclusively on your site or search engine strategies. It’s about enlisting supporters to help spread the word about the awesome work you’re doing. Use your community!

To go down that road begins with identifying the influencers in your space who’ll help carry the message forward, right?

And that’s why you need to know about Twtrland, a social intelligence tool that offers incredibly useful insights about the individuals on Twitter — and, soon, other social networks — who bring the most weight to bear on a particular topic. Probably your topic.

Get insights, reach influencers and discover trends in your sector

Guy Avigdor

Guy Avigdor: “People use us for influencer marketing, to write blog posts, to generate sales leads, for community management — for any form of social media marketing.”

A few days ago Twtrland rolled out a new dashboard for businesses — which works equally well for nonprofits, foundations and other organizations. (Click “start free trial” to check it out for free for seven days.)

Guy Avigdor, co-founder and vice president of business development at Twtrland, gave me a run-through of the service. Twtrland has always billed itself as “a simple way to get insights about your social presence, reach influencers and discover market trends,” but its new features make it even more useful for organizations looking to identify potential evangelists and champions.

Debuting in April 2011 and headquartered in Haifa, Israel, with an office opening soon in New York, Twtrland’s eight-person team has managed to compile groupings of influencers in 60,000 topic areas, from sustainable agriculture to refugees to diabetes care to almost anything you can think of. Through a combination of machine intelligence and human indexing, they identify influencers not based on, say, the description in their Twitter profiles but based on the content they actually produce.

What Twtrland offers, in a word, is context for your Twitter routine, giving you data about which Twitter users are most worth following and engaging with. As I always advise in my social media webinars, you need to find the top influences in your sector and schmooze them up!

Who uses Twtrland? “People use us for influencer marketing, to write blog posts, to generate sales leads, for community management — for any form of social media marketing,” Avigdor said.

The basic service is free, with Pro accounts generally running from $20 to $100 a month, though the company does a subpar job displaying pricing options. Take the free seven-day test drive and decide what’s right for you. If you’re like most nonprofits, the $20 a month price tag is a small price to pay for this treasure trove of social data.

Put social analytics to work for your mission

Here’s how Twtrland works. You sign in via your Twitter or Instagram credentials and register with your name and email, or just use Twtrland anonymously to conduct a search.

Twtrland can show you at a glance how often you’re retweeted, how conversational you are, how often you share others’ tweets, the demographic makeup of your followers and much more

Naturally, you’ll want to see how Twtrland sizes up your own Twitter account, right? (Go ahead, I’ll wait!) Plunk your Twitter handle into the big, fat search field and a few seconds later you should see a snapshot of your Twitter activity (see the National Wildlife Federation’s Twtrland profile at top), displaying:

• The number of tweets per day you average

• The number of times you are retweeted for every 100 tweets you post

• The number of replies you post per 100 tweets (an important stat — if the number is below 5, it means you’re using Twitter as a broadcast medium and not for conversation)

Twtrland also shows you your followers’ gender gap, their location and how many people you’ve talked with recently. Yes, your little ol’ nonprofit is part of Twtrland’s index!

At the top right is a pie chart with a color-coded breakdown of your tweets: retweets that you posted (my advice is to RT generously), replies (aka conversations), links (tweets containing a link), mentions and plain tweets. How does your breakdown compare?

Socialbrite-brands

Further down the profile page you’ll find “Famous words,” some of the top tweets from the account over the years, Followers Analysis, a breakdown of your followers’ demographics, Business Insights, photos and videos shared, endorsements and more. And this is cool: A section showing which brands the person interacted with (see Socialbrite’s example at right).

Keep in mind, you can do the same search on any Twitter user’s handle — including foundations, employees, brands, small businesses, celebrities, friends. And you can also conduct searches by location, if that’s key to your enterprise.

How to home in on the top power users

Influencers on the topic of obesity prevention in California

Influencers on the topic of obesity prevention in California

But the most impressive feature of Twtrland is its ability to bubble up influencers, or “power users,” as they put it, in a particular niche. Marketers have long understood the power of identifying audience segments, and Twtrland offers some top-flight social analytics. Check out the data in some of these searches to get a better sense of Twtrland’s capabilities:

Influencers on obesity prevention in California

Top fundraisers on Twitter from the U.S.

• Bloggers from Egypt

Women 20-40 from NYC

One of the most interesting slices of data is the list of Top Followers for each profile that appears in the left sidebar.

Prepare to spend some time with Twtrland, because it takes some practice to master all of the power under the hood. But the bottom line is that Twtrland is perhaps the most affordable social intelligence tool you can add to your arsenal. And shouldn’t you be increasing your nonprofit’s social IQ?

A version of this article geared to businesses appeared yesterday on Socialmedia.biz.

Related

• Little Bird: New social tool helps identify potential supporters (Socialbrite)

• How to build awareness for your campaign (Socialbrite)

• 10 paid social media monitoring services for nonprofits (Socialbrite)JD Lasica, founder and former editor of Socialbrite, is co-founder of Cruiseable. Contact JD or follow him on Twitter or Google Plus.

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2 thoughts on “Twtrland: Find your nonprofit’s top influencers

  1. Really interesting! Hadn’t heard of Twtrland before, so thank you for this extensively-researched review. I agree that it seems that power users section might be most useful for causes and events. The question: doe you know how Twtrland determines its power users list? How is it like/unlike Klout in making determinations – any thoughts? Thanks!

    • Hi Debra. I think the answer has to be crowd-sourced. Twtrland has just nine staffers at last word so it would be difficult to cover every topic under the sun. For the terms I’ve searched on, it’s been spot on. I suspect it’ll be hit or miss in the nonprofit sector so give it a test run to see if it works well for your cause or subject area.
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