Twitter for Marketing #1: On Following the Influentials

I was probably a somewhat late adopter to Twitter, starting to use the service early in 2008 (The company was founded in 2006), but since Twitter has been getting mad press, I decided I would have to take a second look at the service and try some experiments.

I decided to open a second Twitter account that would focus mostly on MessagingLab but would also include some personal stuff, since I believe people want to do business with someone they know.

I’m going to document some of my findings and hopefully, you’ll find them useful as well.

Some background, since mid-2008, I’ve been posting Tweets as karls_mlab. Probably 50 percent of them have been personal, 25 percent business related, and the other 25 percent split between re-Tweets and answering people. I plan to make the MessagingLab Twitter account more focused on branding and business, keep the karls account more personal. To juggle both accounts, I plan to use as much automation as possible (Matt for twittering multiple accounts and Twitterbot for autoresponses and autofollows).

One more piece of background trivia: I’m a heavy LinkedIn user with a network nearing 11,000 (that puts me – I’m guessing – in the top 10% of LI users). I use LinkedIn nearly every day, mostly for business development and think it is a fantastic tool.

Experiment 1: Is Following the Influencers Worthwhile?

I decide to create a massive following. I started by using Guy Kawasaki’s strategy in his November 2008 post Looking for Mr. Goodtweet. (A similar strategy worked very well for me on LinkedIn.) Guy suggests you follow people with the largest number of followers (but he later reneged on this idea in his December 2008, Using Twitter as a Twool, saying Forget about Influentials.

I went to Twittercounter and somewhat selectively linked to 80 of the top people on the Global 100. Within 24 hours, I had 117 people following me and was following 149.

Total time invested: 1 hour.

Verdict: Go for the influentials.

Experiment 2: Is Following the Foreign Influencers Worthwhile?

The next day, I follow the Top 100 Twitterers in Berlin, Germany. (I speak mittelmassiges Deutsch) and figured it might be interesting to add a different language to my Twitter-Stream.

Total time invested: 20 minutes + 20 minutes

Within 24 hours, I had 174 followers and was following 284, (389 between both accounts according to Splitweet)

Experiment 3: Is Following the Foreign Influencers Worthwhile?

I wanted to repeat the same foreign-language experiment and chose Mexico City as a target. (Interestingly, in both Mexico City and Buenos Aires, you can hit the top 100 Twitterers with just 500 users. In Mexico, you only need a 1,000 to be in the top 15. The number one Twitter in Mexico is @arroba (the @ symbol). (I changed my city to Panama City since it’s not listed and I know I’ll be the number one there in a few days.)

Suggested feature for TwitterCounter – Add top users according to language. Just another way to slice and dice the data streams.