When analysing someone else’s Twitter account, what grabs your attention first? Is it their number of followers, tweets, their profile image? Let’s look at the key metrics you need to analyse on someone’s Twitter account and how it informs you about the user.
The metrics we’re going to talk about can help you identify if someone is a true influencer, their areas of expertise, which geolocations they are influential in, etc.
Suppose you are analysing Twitter users for research or a marketing campaign. In that case, you can look into their interests, activity, and accounts they follow to gather insight about your target audience.
- Number of Followers
- Number of People They Follow (Following)
- Engagement on Their Account
- Their Bio
- Their Verified Status
- Top 3 Geolocations of Their Followers
- Their Last Tweet Date
- How You Can Use Someone’s Twitter Data
Number of Followers
The first indicator of an influential Twitter account is always the number of followers, but this in itself isn’t enough for you to decide it’s an account worth connecting with or analysing.
Since it’s still possible to buy fake followers or get bot accounts to follow any account, the number of followers isn’t all that impressive. For example, if an account has 1 million followers but only 200 engagements each time, the user likely has many fake followers.
Let’s look at the example below. If you’re searching for travel influencers and come across @travellingwus, you may think, “Oh wow, they have 33K followers”. However, many accounts on Twitter are followed by fake or bot accounts. Even very well-known celebrities or accounts have fake followers.
So the amount of engagement on an account (retweets, likes, and replies) should be the one that stands out to you.
If you look at the last few posts they shared, you will see they only received 1-2 likes or retweets. That is a strong indicator that this account may have fake followers. The next thing would be to look at their followers list quickly.
Another metric we will discuss further is the last tweet date. That is important in determining if an account is active on Twitter.
You’ll quickly realise that there are bot accounts following them. Sometimes bot accounts will not have “bot” on their handle. To do an in-depth analysis, you need to download a potential influencer’s list of followers and detect the bot account.
With twtData, you can download followers of multiple accounts and go through them on a spreadsheet or a data analysis tool.
Engagement on Their Account
Now that you know you should investigate the engagement on an account before you decide someone is a genuine influencer, let’s look at some examples.
The engagement rate of a Twitter account can be calculated by dividing the total amount of retweets, likes, and replies by the total number of impressions. However, Twitter doesn’t show the number of impressions of other accounts. Therefore, you can only calculate the engagement rate of your account or access this information on Twitter Analytics.
For example, @barrybutler9 has 55K followers. His profile is not verified, but he seems to have a strong community of followers. On average, his posts get 600-900 likes.
He could be considered a micro-influencer.
For example, if you run a small printing shop or camera equipment shop in Chicago, it would be a good idea to reach out to Barry for a potential collaboration.
Number of People They Follow (Following)
When an account is truly influential, they usually have a substantial difference between their number of followers vs the number of accounts they are following.
An account with many more followers than following is likely to be a notable account in their industry. Take Serena Williams’ account as an example. She is known all over the world. 10.7 million people follow her, yet she only follows 368.
While other accounts may seem like they have a lot of followers, what’s important is how they gained them.
Some accounts use hashtags or phrases such as #follow4follow or #teamfollowback on their bio or tweets as a tactic to grow their followers. Therefore, their number of followers and following will be close to each other. If this is the case, you should check the engagement on their account.
For example, this music journalist follows 284.4K accounts, but he is also followed by 803.9K people. We notice that he also has a Twitter verified badge on his profile (which we will explain later). We can also look at the engagement on his last few tweets to determine if he is notable enough.
Their Bio
A Twitter user’s bio always stands out because it showcases their profession, who they are, or their interests. This is not necessarily a metric, but you can derive important information about Twitter accounts from their bio.
So when you are searching for influencers, professionals, or people with certain interests, you can try using relevant keywords to find them. Especially if you’re looking for content creators, people in the media, academia, government, and more.
Suppose you’re looking for influencers in the finance sector who are specifically interested in cryptocurrencies. You can download followers of an account such as Bitcoin News and filter on the bio section.
Filter public profiles according to follower number, then start searching for keywords. For example, if you need a video creator, you can search ‘Youtuber’ or ‘video’ in the bio (description) section.
You can also choose their verified status, TRUE or FALSE. Looking at verified profiles may narrow down your search, but if you are after micro-influencers then it would be a good idea to consider both verified and non-verified profiles.
Another keyword you could consider is “influencer”.
You can apply this in many ways to categorise the type of people you want to follow or consider your target audience.
Their Verified Status
Verified accounts indicate a user is “authentic, notable, and active” as Twitter puts it. What does this mean?
Brands, industry experts, journalists, and public personalities get verified by Twitter all the time. Think of journalists who write for well-known publications such as The Guardian. Or successful industry experts such as Neil Patel.
If you want to get verified on Twitter, first, you need to prove that you’re a real person or organisation (or TV show, podcast, band, artist, etc.) to be authentic. Then, demonstrate that you’re notable by providing a link to news, Wikipedia, or other notable coverage about you. Finally, you’ll have to be active on Twitter.
So it’s likely that verified accounts you come across meet these requirements, which means that a verified Twitter account will not be fake. If you’re searching for industry experts on a subject, it’s a good idea to look at verified profiles.
Top 3 Geolocations of Their Followers
Language and culture are important concepts in the Twitterverse. So if you’re analysing someone’s Twitter account, you should look at the top 3 geolocations of their followers. This would help you gain a better understanding of their audience and learn if they are a good match for your business/brand.
For example, if you are a local business (like a coffee shop in London), it would be good to look for an influential account whose content reaches people in London and the UK.
You can download followers of the influencers you’d like to work with and filter your desired locations.
However, you’ll only be able to see a Twitter account’s location if the user provided that information.
Their Last Tweet Date
Twitter is a quick platform where users can go viral one day with their content, and lose traction with their next tweet. So it’s easy to gain a great reach and following and lose that engagement the next day.
Most Twitter users tweet once a month, while the most prolific Twitter users tweet 157 times a month. So if you are analysing an account, reviewing their activity is a good idea. For example, you can look at their last tweet date, and if it’s over a few months ago, they are not an active user.
If you want to compare the last tweet date of multiple accounts to figure out which one is more active, you can use twtData. Download tweets from multiple accounts and filter the data by date. This way, you’ll not only be able to see how proactive an account is but also the engagement their tweets get.
Keywords and Hashtags They Use in Their Tweets
When you’re analysing someone else’s Twitter account to deduct their interests, you should look at the keywords and hashtags they use.
You can download tweets someone has sent in the last 7 days for free or pay to download their entire tweet history for an in-depth analysis. twtData will send you a word cloud of the words they use most often so you can pick up on the keywords and hashtags they use. You can make a list of an account’s preferred hashtags and even accounts they mention regularly.
This can help you gain insight into how dedicated an influencer is to their audience, what other interests they talk about and if their tone of voice aligns with your business/brand.
How You Can Use Someone’s Twitter Data
If you need to conduct analysis on multiple accounts and don’t have the time to go over the metrics we mentioned above one by one, then you need to use twtData.
You can analyse these metrics to target a specific audience, find influencers, gather insight about your followers, and more. Read how the new NFT platform ART3.io used twtData to analyse over 12.3 million Twitter user data for their marketing campaign.
Do you need to download Twitter user data in bulk? Contact us at sales@twtData.com to learn how we can help.