All that content has to go somewhere. It’s not enough to produce great content, it has to be presented to the right people.
Otherwise, what’s the point?
Finding your audience and building a community is a superb way to put your content to work. It’s also a way to develop your thinking, meet new people and advance what you are doing. All these interactions will change what you do and how you do it. You will learn from your community.
In industry jargon, the people you need to speak to are ‘influencers’. These people might be journalists, bloggers, marketers, businesspeople. Really anyone at all who knows your business and can make a difference to it.
This is always an ongoing process, but the hardest thing is getting started.
Find your influencers
The most time-consuming and difficult process is to kick everything off. Who do you need to talk to?
Assuming you know your sector well, you will already know many of the right people to speak to. But you can always find more.
Finding the right people may not necessarily be finding the top people. Significant influencers could be those who write a superb blog or gather thousands of Twitter followers. If you know the industry best, you need to make that decision.
How to find these people is not so tricky, but time consuming. There are many tools on the market to help you find people on social platforms.
Twitter is the bedrock for most of these products, as it is the place most active with social traffic, and has the most data. Most bloggers will link their blog to a Twitter account, using Twitter as a shop window, so is a good place to start.
General
These tools cover a range of social media, so give the best overviews. Unfortunately, most are paid-for services, but some do offer free trials.
- uvrx gives social search returns to queries, so shows profiles and topics from key words from a dozen or so social networks and blog sites. It’s free and adapts Google’s search.
- Little Bird is a paid-for tool that aims to find out who influencers really are, and not just popular accounts talking about a particular topic. Tip: sign-up for their report, which will give an analysis of your Twitter handle, for free.
- Traackr is another paid-for tool to find social influence and runs across a number of social media. No free trial.
- PeerIndex British-based company gives scores based on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest and others. No free trial, but they are looking for investors.
- Buzzsumo tracks several different networks and is a paid-for service but can be tried for free.
- Trackur is another paid-for service, but considerably cheaper than some of the premium products on the market, and offers a 10-day free trial.
There are many ways you can find relevant Twitter users. Here are a few to get you started. Most are free.
- Wefollow ranks Twitter users, there to help you find prominent or influential people.
- Topsy lets you search Twitter’s archive back to 2006 (something you cannot do on Twitter), and has an influencer tab, so you can start finding people quickly.
- Followerwonk is another Twitter analysis tool that can let you compare and analyse users to see how useful they might be.
- Peerreach examines your followers and who you follow, and will help you check you are on the right path once your campaign is underway.
Google+
- Circlecount lets you search for users and pages, but not search by topic. Does let you see how engaged users are.
Blogs
- GroupHigh is unfortunately a paid tool, but will help you find the right bloggers and conversations for what you are doing.
- Inkybee uses various social media to find prominent bloggers, and to rank them.
Once you have found your audience, we will discuss what to do next in subsequent post.
