Twtrland

When it comes to promoting your work Twitter is a very effective tool if you know how to use it – but so many people don’t! This is another subject I cover at some length in Working the Cloud, as well as recommending lots of tools to help you manage your social relationships. It’s not enough just to look at how many followers someone has as that number is pretty meaningless if no-one is listening to them. One of the biggest mistakes I see people make with Twitter is thinking that a large volume of followers signifies a successful or influential twitter account, but if no-one is reading their tweets they may as well be followed by monkeys! This is usually the case when people use the ‘follow back’ strategy for growing their following, where they promise to follow you if you also follow them. Look at how many people an account like this are following; if it reaches into the thousands  it’s very unlikely they will ever see your tweets rushing through their feed with thousands of others. Twtrland is one of the tools I use to identify Twitter accounts that are linked to certain key-words and/or geographic locations that have a good level of engagement from their followers as well as just a large headcount. This engagement level means people are reading and more importantly sharing their tweets, so if you can get them interested in what you have to say there will be a much greater chance of your messages spreading beyond your immediate social circles.