Simple way of using Twitter to measure brand strength

The purpose of this article is to demonstrate a way of using Twitter as a tool to measure your own brand influence. To better illustrate this I am going to use the study of our own Twitter account which at this point follows carefully picked 1,500 Twitter users.

How did we come up with those?

Couple of months ago we reset people we follow to near zero and then started from scratch. This was just an autumn clean-up which was initiated with no particular reason. However an idea was quickly born.

The goal is to use Twitter to follow only the most influential people in your market (for us it is WordPress, more precisely WordPress developers and designers). These would be people whose opinion you respect, who are moving the field and whom one day you’d ideally love to have as customers.

Here is how to find them:

What is the big idea?

The idea is that your brand strength (reach, influence and perception) correlates with the percentage of relevant influencers in your target market that opted into following you.

To calculate the exact metric, find out how many people that you follow, follow you back and divide this with the total number of people you follow.

In our case it is 588 out of 1,500 users (I use a free tool called CrowdFire to extract this number).

Which gives a brand strength metric of 39.2%. There, for me this number represents the influence of the ManageWP brand in our relevant portion of the WordPress market.

Obviously this can range from 0% to 100%. If you picked the influencers carefully it will be very hard to achieve 100% rating.

What do you do about it?

You obviously work on your branding to increase it.

In the few months that I have been following this metric I have happily observed an increase in our brand strength. It is of course satisfactory, given that we have been consciously working on increasing our brand reach.

Do not expect results over night, these things really take time. And the metric will reflect that – you can not force someone into following you (even if you could it should be of course left to happen naturally).

bst

How do you further expand the people you follow?

Here are some ideas.

A neat side effect

Since you carefully filtered whom you follow, and these are people relevant to your business, your Twitter activity feed becomes actually useful. I use it as one of the main tools for discovery of new information and resources that I later either retweet or share through sites like ManageWP.org.

This is great, give me more!

There are two more free Twitter related tools that you can use to measure your brand strength.

Followerwonk will give you amazing amount of statistics but also include a metric called Social authority which you can track monthly as well.

Twitter’s own analytics will give you engagement rate which indirectly measures the ‘speed’ of your brand reach.

(yeah 1.7% sucks but that’s Twitter, don’t hope for much more)

Final thoughts

This gives you a simple and honest answer to the question how influential is your brand. More importantly it allows you to track the trend and you can use it to effectively measure the results of your branding team.

Welcoming your thoughts and feedback.

Vladimir Prelovac

Vladimir is the Founder of ManageWP, and is a frequent contributor to the WordPress community - in the form of numerous plug-ins, tools, WordCamp talks and a book by the title WordPress Plugin Development.

8 Comments

  1. Nemanja Aleksic

    A quick followup on the ManageWP experiment: we’ve grown our list to 1,663 influencers, and our follow back rate has reached 40%

    It seems we’re doing something right 🙂

  2. Lara Littlefield

    This is a really great strategy that we use at Simmer, and for our client accounts as well. It makes sense from a “real world” standpoint, too. You can only REALLY gain quality conversation from a maximum of around 1,000 individuals in a single room, right? I think when we start to think of Twitter connections more as human relationships, we start to gain a lot, especially from a customer service perspective, too.

    Thanks for sharing! Looking forward to more in this marketing vein from you and the team very much.

  3. PNR Status

    Is it necessary to clean your previous followers. It now get you fresh, related and most active followers.

  4. Prerna

    This is a good article of measuring twitter strength but I have actually observed no matter how much you engage with twitter, fb always heads up because its more popular among common people and most of my posts gets so many liked on fb but rarely on twitter. Thank you so much for some of the valuable points.

  5. Ahmad Awais

    Interesting stuff, and I’d really wanna know what made you clean the account before you started working this way?

  6. danieliser

    Interesting analysis. I will have to break my own down but I believe I have used similar tactics in the last few months to build my list of people to follow. Glad to see I was on the right track.

    PS I feel honored since you followed me on the same day you posted this 😉 @daniel_iser

    By the looks of your stat keeping your making great progress. I always like to see my stats going up and up like that. Keep up the good work.

    1. danieliser

      On another note, what made you decide to wipe the slate clean and start fresh on who you follow? Any particular reasoning or just a cluttered mess before?

      1. ManageWP

        Well that was kind of a random decision that then progressed into this 🙂

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Add as many websites as you want for free, no credit card required. Sign up and start saving time!



Have questions? Get in touch!