If you’re looking to connect with people in a particular niche on Twitter, Followerwonk could be just the tool for you. It’s currently free to search Twitter biographies, compare users and analyse followers of multiple accounts, so try it out before subscriptions kick in.

What can I find out about my followers?

By linking a Twitter account to Followerwonk, users can run a number of different analytic reports for free. Below is a list of the most useful for strategically growing a following and connecting with ‘influencers’ in a specific area:

• Influence scores – how influential are your followers?
• Follower counts – how many followers do your followers have?
• Mapped locations – where are your followers located? (see below)

• Account ages – how long have your followers been on Twitter?
• Recencies of tweets – are your followers dormant or active?
• Bio word cloud – what do your followers tweet about? Are you reaching the right people?
• Retweets – what percentage of your followers’ tweets are made up of retweets? How likely are they to retweet your content?
• Tweet times – when are your followers tweeting? (see below)

What can I find out about my competitors?

If you run several Twitter accounts and are wondering how many of your followers overlap and follow multiple accounts, you can run a free comparison of up to three different accounts. The results are displayed in a handy venn diagram, as below. As well as comparing your own accounts, you can also compare competitor accounts. For example, below I have compared followers of @bmj_latest and @TheLancet. There is a good deal of overlap between the two, with 22, 285 people following both accounts. However, there are almost double that number following each of the accounts individually. This provides a very targetted list of potential followers that can be approached by either account.

Search engine

FollowerWonk can also act as a search engine for Twitter profiles. If you’re an academic publisher looking to connect with students in a particular area, you might type in “history students” into Followerwonk’s search box. You can also include additional parameters, such as location, minimum number of followers and/or number of tweets. Search results are then sorted by ‘social influence’, so that you can easily target influencers in a particular niche.

If you’re looking for new people to follow on Twitter, or simply want to analyse who’s following you, I’d recommend having a look at Followerwonk while it’s still free.

For more information on how the tool can be employed, take a look at the video below: