Twitter hasn’t been as popular as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, or TikTok. Its user base is merely above 335 million and since Elon Musk bought the platform it lost millions of subscribers, including brands. Its content format is short and textual and allows real-time discussions. This poses a challenge for many brands and industries that build on visuality and lengthy content.
To be successful on Twitter, you’ll need authoritative figures with knowledge and credibility, who are excellent in concise communication. You should find influencers who are able to initiate conversations and are quick to react. Apart from being subject matter experts, they need to have a relatable personality, authentically convey their thoughts, or amplify other sources’ ideas with theirs.
These are the characteristics that encourage brands to team up with influencers on Twitter. But what businesses should use Twitter for influencer marketing and how can they find Twitter influencers? Our article will give you an overview of the platform’s unique features that make it stand out from other social media, as well as how industries can utilize it to their advantage. And we will list ten online and offline tactics to search for influencers on Twitter.
What Brands Can Benefit from Twitter Influencers?
Twitter is used by diverse industries, like news and media, tech, finance, retail, consumer goods, entertainment, politics, education, and nonprofits. They take advantage of Twitter’s strengths to reach niche communities, inform people, and use its conversational nature to engage with their audiences quickly.
The latter feature is especially beneficial for companies that place a great emphasis on customer service, such as consumer electronics, retail, e-commerce, and CPG brands. Twitter is widely used by businesses to answer customers’ questions and address their concerns in a transparent manner. These brands can enhance customer experience and their credibility further by partnering with reliable voices.
Twitter’s conversational format enables companies to directly interact with their followers, analyze their feedback, and build a community. Influencers can drive engagement through their discussions with audiences so that brands can create more personalized content. Educational institutes and nonprofit services may benefit from influencers’ power to connect like-minded people and spark dialogues about cultural and social topics.
Witty commentaries and views, valuable thoughts, and insights work well on Twitter. Tech and finance companies that want to stress thought leadership can work together with key opinion leaders, developers, and entrepreneurs to share updates and establish authority in their fields.
Now how about identifying those thought leaders?
10 Proven Ways to Find Twitter Influencers
Do a hashtag search on Twitter’s Search bar
Hashtags serve as keywords on social media. Users tag their content so that readers can easily discover their tweets if they search for a topic. In this sense, hashtags can be used to categorize content as well.
Type in hashtags that are often used in your industry, or those that are related to the products or services you offer or professions. Then click on the People tab and scan the list of accounts that appear. Check the profiles one by one and analyze their content, niche relevance, and engagement levels. Look for people, whose tweets are retweeted, liked, and commented on by many users.
A keyword and a hashtag search can equally help you find experts on a topic
Browse Twitter’s Explore tab
The Explore tab displays popular tweets and accounts, and trending topics based on your location. You may change your location to global or select another country in Explore’s settings. This is a great place to discover rising influencers who take part in interesting and thought-provoking conversations. Of course, you should check back regularly to keep up with changes in your industry and location.
Find Twitter Lists
Extend your search for professionals by exploring Twitter Lists. These are lists of accounts around a particular topic. Click on the Lists tab on the left and enter a keyword in the search field at the top and you’ll be able to see all the groups that were created in your theme. You can subscribe to lists, analyze the members’ Twitter profiles and activity, and see what industry professionals talk about.
SEO-related groups on Twitter
There is a chance that some Twitter gurus you identified or follow are members of numerous lists. You can check this by going to their profile page, clicking on the three dots, and then on View Lists. This is another great way to look for similar experts and bloggers on Twitter.
Join Twitter Communities
Similar to Facebook groups, Twitter Communities are created and monitored by Twitter users. It enables users with the same interests, experience, and knowledge to come together and discuss it in great detail. Find Twitter influencers by joining communities relevant to your industry and participating in the conversations. By clicking on Communities you will be presented with several popular topics like Technology, Art, Entertainment, etc. Or you can search by keywords.
Use Twitter’s Analytics
Although Twitter Analytics won’t provide you with a straightforward list of the most engaging profiles, there are a few workarounds on how to find influencers on Twitter with its native analytics feature. You may use it to check your most engaging tweets with the highest number of impressions. It’s worth going back to these posts, scrolling through the users who left comments, and picking those who left a thought-provoking reply. You may use third-party Twitter analytics tools to get a more comprehensive overview of your tweets’ performance.
Leverage social listening tools
Social media management and listening tools are another great option to discover trustworthy voices on Twitter. Tweetdeck is Twitter’s social media management tool and allows users to manage several Twitter accounts in the same place. With Tweetdeck, you can set up custom columns to monitor keywords, hashtags, and mentions. You can create a column for tracking direct messages and notifications so that you can instantly reply to messages or act if needed.
Social listening tools in general come in handy when you monitor multiple keywords and hashtags that are close to your interests or topics. Through these key terms, you’ll be able to find influencers on Twitter who regularly contribute to a particular conversation. After identifying them you need to evaluate how engaging their content is and how many followers they have.
Find Twitter influencers with influencer discovery tools
A straightforward way to find Twitter influencers is to turn to influencer discovery tools. Despite most of them being subscription-based they save you a ton of time. Make sure to choose one that includes Twitter in its search feature because most influencer marketing platforms cover only YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram.
Out of the over 137+ million creators, HypeAuditor’s database includes 12.2 million Twitter influencers and offers numerous filters to fine-tune your search. First, you need to specify the keyword or niche then you may add as many filters as you want including the influencer’s size and location, ER, and follower growth. You may search for influencers by various engagement metrics, such as average tweets, retweets, and replies in the past 30 days.
Uncover Twitter influencers with Google
You can try to find Twitter influencers with a simple Google search. Just type in a keyword or profession related to your industry and add ‘Twitter’ to it. For example, ‘Twitter nutritionist’ will provide you with websites that accumulate lists of nutritionists active on Twitter, but Google will list specific accounts as well that use the keyword ‘nutritionist’ in their usernames and bios.
You can search for exact matches by using quotation marks or an operator like ‘site:twitter.com’ to narrow down the search results to Twitter. Check the ‘People also search for’ section in Google to discover additional recommendations related to your key term.
Sidenote: You can uncover niche blogs and authoritative figures in your sector if you specifically look for bloggers. So combine a keyword, like ‘content marketing’ or ‘AI writer’ with the word ‘blogger’ and see the results. You can find curated lists of top bloggers if you add modifiers like ‘top’ and ‘best’ to your search terms.
Track your competitors’ campaigns
Be aware of your major Twitter competitors and monitor how often their hashtags, brand names, and products appear in tweets. You can do quick research every day using Twitter’s search bar and gather data on spreadsheets or utilize a social listening tool. Observe if your competition is mentioned by the same people within a specified time. If yes, then they are engaged in a Twitter influencer marketing campaign.
Once you have a list of users actively promoting other rival brands, you can search for similar Twitter profiles on Google. Again, you may do this by typing ‘Twitter accounts similar to {influencerhandle}’ and combing through the results. Or use the ‘related ’operator, like in the example, ‘related:twitter.com/username’.
Attend events closely associated with your industry
Whether online or on-site events, conferences and webinars are ideal bases for getting to know new faces and maintaining old connections. Keep an eye on event hashtags on Twitter and other social media channels and check the key speakers and commentators. It’s worth researching the organizers or sponsors of these events because they could worked with industry experts before.
If you can participate personally, chat with your current business contacts and ask for referrals on the venue. Or you may directly talk to speakers and attendees and start building relationships with them.
How to Find Twitter Influencers: Quick Recap
Though not the most widely used social media channel, Twitter is leveraged by businesses that prefer real-time feedback and use it for improving customer experience and enhancing their content. Twitter is a hotspot for establishing authority and credibility and engaging the audience in a meaningful dialogue. For this, you’ll need influential voices who can express themselves in a witty and concise manner.
Our article mentioned multiple ways to find influencers utilizing Twitter’s features and other solutions outside the platform. Be sure to try them out and incorporate searches on Twitter with offline methods or tools. And remember to engage with industry gurus and build a relationship with them before you jumpstart your Twitter influencer marketing.
