Building a Powerful Twitter Community with Influencers

TwitterUsing Twitter to boost your company’s growth is about building a community of followers who relate to your industry and who will eventually develop a passion for your brand.

Finding connectors, thought leaders or industry experts and building relationships with them is vital as it’s the quickest and easiest way to build a significant Twitter community.

1- Discover influencers in your network

Use Followerwonk [ https://followerwonk.com ] to check out your current Twitter followers ranked by the platform’s statistic called ‘social authority’, which is based on the retweet rate of users’ latest few hundred tweets, the recentness of those tweets and a retweet-based model trained on user profile data.

2- Learn your competition’s connections

Twitter’s transparency makes competitive research super-accessible and your competitors’ networks are most likely to include influencers who are directly related to your business. Find these connectors on Followerwonk but this time using your competitors’ handles.

3- Look for influencers in your niche

You can use Followerwonk’s ‘social authority’ to guide you through this process but keep in mind that you have to zero in on the tweep’s emphasis as people who are involved in what you do will best fit your community.

Start off by building a list of 15 to 20 people who would be fit to nurture a relationship with.

4- Follow and interact with tweeps

Building your community requires you to focus on the conversations you have. Keep in mind that replying directly to a person will only show up in their timeline and the timelines of people you both follow, so include your response in a retweet, which will reach a greater number of users.

5- Track your influencers’ posts and mentions by setting up alerts

Use tools like Google Alerts [ http://www.google.com/alerts ] and Fresh Web Explorer [http://moz.com/tools/fresh-web-explorer ] to dig up where your industry influencers share their thoughts and opinions outside of Twitter and shine the light on them by sharing on Twitter a good article they’ve written.

6- Add value outside of Twitter

Now that you’ll be aware whenever connectors you follow are mentioned across the web, you’re able to point people’s attention to their relevant resources and maintain mutually beneficial relationships with them.

Share their stories, comment on their blogs and give them a helping hand whenever it’s possible as this will increase the chances you have at them being receptive to what you have to say later on.

Biz Stone Launches Q&A App Jelly

Jelly App

Twitter cofounder Biz Stone along with a seven-person startup, has launched a question-and-answer style mobile social networking app called Jelly, available for free for iOS and Android users.

Jelly enables users of submitting questions with an attached photo captured from their smartphone camera, which will become available for their Facebook and Twitter connections to then respond to via the app with a link, a drawing on the original picture, or simply a text. Questions can also be forwarded via text message.

“In a world where 140 characters is considered a maximum length, a picture really is worth a thousand words,” Stone wrote in a post on Jelly’s blog. “Images are in the foreground of the Jelly experience because they add depth and context to any question.

Born out of a passion for helping people, Stone believes that Jelly is capable of making an act of kindness relatively simple. Stone got the idea for Jelly with cofounder Ben Finkel, cofounder of Fluther, another question-and-answer service that Twitter acquired in December 2010.

The “Finkel Rank” displays questions to the most relevant audience of a user’s social connections and is expected to improve over time as the application gathers more user data and should help improve Jelly’s functionality.

The app’s name was inspired by jellyfish, which have “a loose network of nerves that act as a ‘brain’ similar to the way we envision loosely distributed networks of people coordinating via Jelly to help each other,” Stone wrote in the blog post.

Links:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/jelly/id685652528

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.jellyhq.starfish

Facebook Sponsored Stories to Be Eliminated in April 2014

FacebookAccording to a blog post, Facebook will be retiring Sponsored Story ads starting April 9, so you better hurry up if you’re looking to invest in one!

Sponsored stories appear when a user’s Facebook friend engages with a sponsored Page, app or event. For example, if one of your Facebook friends Liked a Brand Page, and that page has chosen to promote that engagement, a Sponsored Story would appear on your News Feed.

By April 9, Sponsored Stories will not be up for purchase for Advertisers and existing Sponsored Stories will turn into other format of ads. In example, a Sponsored Story highlighting a page Like will just turn into a Page Like ad and the “social context” component of Sponsored Story ads where a single or multiple friends of yours are featured in the ad, will simply become commonplace in all of Facebook’s advertisements. The social context will become a greater part of the Facebook’s advertising strategy in June.

A  Facebook spokesperson explains:

“As announced in June of last year, we’re bringing the best of sponsored stories – social context – to all ads. Since this update makes sponsored stories redundant, we will no longer offer them as a standalone ad unit for marketers. Social context will continue to appear with all ads where eligible. Our social advertising honors the audience that people choose, so nobody will see information in social context for an ad that they couldn’t already see.”