When I first started using Twitter I would monitor the Crossman Communications Twitter feed manually. I would log in to my Twitter account, add followers one by one, and respond to direct messages through the platform itself. This could be time consuming. There are a lot of different ways to use Twitter for business and one of the beliefs I have about that platform is that it’s generally a good idea to have a higher number of followers than people who you are following. And there are a lot of people in your Twitter community with whom you are probably never going to do business. They are not in your target audience and they don’t offer a service you need or desire. Possibly they also opened a Twitter account two years ago, gathered 300 followers, sent out 11 tweets and then haven’t touched the platform since. You are clearly not going to have much opportunity to start a conversation that might lead to a sale with those people.  And it’s unlikely that they will add to your overall quality of life in any way.

So there is no compelling reason to follow them. You want to fill your Twitter funnel with the people and businesses that are going to contribute to your well-being and with whom you might have a productive and profitable relationship. Getting rid of clutter is an important part of that process.

It was fairly easy to track our followers early on when there were only a few hundred of them. But as time went on, and the account gained more traction, it became far too time consuming—and unprofitable—for us to weed through the Twitter account unfollowing the folks who were unlikely to become productive business connections.

How Tweepsmap Works

And then along came Tweepsmap. Tweepsmap is an application that integrates with your Twitter account and provides a weekly report on what’s happening on that platform. You can sign up for a free or a paid account, and, since we don’t have a massive strategy on Twitter at this point, the free account is all we really need right now. Tweepsmap tells us where our followers are located and what percentage are located in which countries. This is good information for a business to have: 42.2% of our Twitter followers are located in Ontario right now and 2.5% of them are located in Florida. Knowing this allows us to fine tune our offers and our language to maximize our appeal to those people who are most likely to do business with us. It can also queue us to say, “Hmmmm, we’re not doing so well in Florida right now and we want to – why don’t we fine tune our marketing strategy to give an extra incentive to people in Florida to follow us online?”

The free Tweepsmap account also lets us see who has unfollowed us recently and that gives us the option of unfollowing them in return or, if they are an important target for our marketing strategy, finding ways of communicating with them elsewhere. The platform tells us which Twitter accounts have not tweeted in six months and which ones have not tweeted in two months. If they are not active, and they are not a specific target, then, again, we have the option of eliminating them from our “Following” list. If a business is not active on Twitter, we are less likely to be able to connect with them or influence them on that platform.

The upshot is that this tool has become a great way to streamline our efforts on Twitter: we can stop following the accounts that are unlikely to bear business fruit so we can focus our messaging on the universe of people who are possibly potential clients, or their influencers. It’s a very helpful tool!

If you’d like to find out about a few other online tools to boost your content marketing results, please contact me at info@crossmancommunications.com and let’s book a conversation to find out what that might look like.