If you’re active in social media, you know that engagement is the name of the game. But how do you grow engagement? A few steps are obvious: (1) Take part in the conversation and (2) post compelling stuff. Beyond that, it’s very helpful to cultivate Influencers who can help spread the word. Influencers are people who have an above-average impact on an audience segment that’s important to your organization. So if you’re a college admissions director, for example, you’d seek out people who have exceptional influence on prospective students.
Topsy is a really easy way to find Influencers. Topsy is a realtime search engine powered by the social web. Unlike traditional web search engines, Topsy indexes and ranks search results based upon the most influential conversations millions of people are having every day about each specific term, topic, page or domain.
Here’s how it works. Start with a relevant source. You can use Google Analytics to find web pages or blog articles on your website that have the most shares. Looking at my alma mater, the University of Delaware, a good starting point would be the UDaily news page. A search on that URL yields a list like this:
That query pulled up a list of 10 people who have tweeted about the UDaily page recently. Now comes the fun part. Click on the Influential Only button and presto!
Meet Phil Woods. He’s an Influencer (as defined by Topsy’s algorithm) who has tweeted about that page. This is someone we want to get to know and begin cultivating a relationship with. We’ll want to follow him, interact with him, and send him relevant info that he may want to tweet on.
That’s one good way to grow engagement. If you have your own favorite method, please share!