ScoutZen Blog

Invite Team Members to ScoutZen

Wed, 12 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000

ScoutZen now allows you to share scout results and coordinate tasks with people on your team. Invite members with assigned roles within your account. Team members can quickly accept the invite, set up their own login and start viewing and researching results. As an account owner, you retain full administrative and billing control.

Read on for more details, best practices and a step-by-step guide on using ScoutZen with your team.

Signup for ScoutZen with a 7-day FREE trial

Get more done with shared access

Just like any other team, you can be more productive with ScoutZen by dividing up tasks and sharing the load. Team members can help in exploring scout results, analyzing activity for insights or integrating data with other tools. Others can set up new scouts as needs evolve. It also becomes easy to manage a large number of active scouts and campaigns by partitioning responsibility amongst team members.

Improved security and peace of mind

Keep your Twitter and ScoutZen accounts more secure. You never have to share passwords with others. With their own login and password management, you will not even have to respond to queries for resetting forgotten passwords. It can all be done directly by your associates within ScoutZen using their own email address.

Team members who are not owners can view scout activity and results, but they do not permissions to modify scouts, access billing information or update other account settings.

Whether you engage with contractors, consultants or freelancers, ScoutZen teams makes it easy to grant access, restrict roles and when required, remove members from the team.

Inviting your team

To get started adding members, visit your Settings page and click on the Members section. Fill out the invite member form and we will send them an email with instructions to join your team on ScoutZen. You will also be able to track their status at any time by returning to the Members page.

Here’s a walkthrough of the process:

Joining a team on ScoutZen

Invited members can set up their own login and password with a few clicks. They will automatically be added to the team and have access to scouts and results.

Start collaborating

Team invites are now available on the Plus Plan, which comes with a free 7-day trial. In addition to Teams, the Plus plan provides you with 25 Scouts to accommodate your social media strategies.

For current customers, visit your Billing Settings to upgrade to the Plus Plan.

Get started on ScoutZen with a 7-day FREE trial

Sync Starred Results to Twitter Lists

Fri, 24 Feb 2017 22:40:00 +0000

ScoutZen lets you sync your scout results to Twitter lists. This feature has been getting increasingly popular, and we have made some changes to make it efficient while giving users full control over what gets synced. The improved sync policy enables several interesting use cases, which we will describe in more detail below.

Introducing Starred Results

As you might have noticed, we have spruced up the scout results page. Instead of one profile per row, on desktop and tablet form factors, each row displays three mini-card style profiles.

This new approach lets us achieve several UX goals:

Increased information density. Everything about a particular profile can be taken in quickly in a few hundred pixels, without having to scan the whole screen.
Layout consistency. Profile fields are always in expected places without wrapping or extending horizontally or vertically, despite variations in field length or their absence.
Logical grouping. Links for profile lookup and follow are adjacent, while ScoutZen actions are clustered together. This also benefits from and contributes to layout consistency.
More available actions. Finally, this redesign allows us to place two new features within easy access: a) Display matching tweets and b) Star selected results.

Mark With a Star

Each profile includes a star as the first action at the top right. Use it to mark people who you consider important or want to find easily. An already starred profile simply shows an orange star instead of a clickable button. These “starred results” can be easily accessed by selecting “Starred” from the Actions dropdown.

Within the Starred results listing, any item can be “Unstarred” if you no longer want it marked special.

Making Lists

Starring results is thus a great way to organize people for follow-up. In effect, you can conveniently build a list within the scout results, with a quick indication (star) that you have done so.

So its only natural that you would want to turn these starred results in to a Twitter list. If you have not done so yet, check out our primer on Twitter lists and their many benefits.

Syncing to Twitter List

ScoutZen has long had support for syncing results to Twitter lists. As described earlier, syncing results to Twitter lets you see the list timeline and tweets in your favorite Twitter client.

Setting up the sync is easy, either via scout settings, or directly from the starred results page.

As before, start by providing the Twitter list name. If the list does not exist, it is created automatically. Newly created lists can be specified to be public or private as appropriate. The sync can be temporarily disabled, but generally you would start by checking “Enable Sync” and save the settings.

ScoutZen will then schedule an initial sync in the background. This will create the list and add previously starred results as members. After that, any starred items will be quickly and incrementally added to the Twitter list. Conversely, unstarred items will be removed from the Twitter list.

Sync Policies

If the specified Twitter list does not exist, it is created.
If the Twitter list exists, its attributes are not changed.
After finding or creating the Twitter list, ScoutZen tracks the list by its list id. You are free to rename the list on Twitter, and ScoutZen will update its name to reflect the change.
If you change the Twitter list name via ScoutZen sync settings, it does not rename the existing list. Rather, it finds or creates a Twitter list with the new name.
During initial sync, pre-existing members of a Twitter list are not purged. The sync will add starred results to the Twitter list.
Members are only removed from Twitter list if they are Unstarred in ScoutZen.
The sync is subject to rate limits and undocumented throttling. A large initial sync might take several days to get all members added.

With these policies, it is possible for multiple scouts to sync to one Twitter list. Starred items from all the different scouts will be added to the list. Unstarred items will be removed, provided they are not starred in other scouts syncing to the same list.

Of course, as before, every scout can sync to its own Twitter list. The target list can be changed at any point, in which case the new list will be initialized with all previously starred results.

One more thing…

For search scouts, you can view the tweet which led to the match and inclusion within the scout results.

We believe these changes will let you curate Twitter list members more effectively, while being selective and increasing awareness. In particular, you can star results in conjunction with the search and sort features. For example, find people with a keyword, sort them by number of followers, review their profile at a glance and star them. Its easy to star hundreds of items within a few minutes, while gleaning a lot of understanding about the results.

Syncing to Twitter lists is just one more way ScoutZen can help you with marketing and outreach. Stay tuned for more news on this and other features!

Scout with Twitter Advanced Search

Wed, 08 Feb 2017 17:40:00 +0000

Twitter provides a comprehensive set of search parameters to find very specific content. Using Advanced Search, results can be tailored for particular locations, date ranges, people and more.

Whether you are looking to find leads, focus on customer needs or track competitors, this guide will show you how to use Advanced Search effectively.

Run Twitter Advanced Search 24/7 with ScoutZen.

Continue on to get all the details.

The Basics of Twitter Advanced Search

Twitter provides multiple avenues for search. The search bar on the mobile app or website, or the simple web search page are great for quickly looking up certain keywords, topics or hashtags. However, as this how-to from Twitter’s Small Business Marketing Team describes, Advanced Search offers a lot more:

You could see every Tweet from today, by someone in your city (or another location), with the phrase “what should I have for dinner?”. You could filter to see everything a particular account (maybe your competitor) Tweeted in October. You could find a Tweet by remembering a phrase in it — even if you forgot who Tweeted it. You could find all the users who have “fashionista” in their bios and so much more.

Search Parameters

As you can see in the screenshot above, there are numerous options and parameters to fine-tune what you are looking for by words, people, places, dates and sentiment, to find tweets:

Containing all given words in any position
Containing exact phrases
Containing any of the given words
Excluding specific words
With specific hashtags
Written in a specific language
From particular accounts
Sent as replies to particular accounts
Mentioning these accounts
Near this place (e.g. city, state, country)
Within a specific date range
Tone: Positive, Negative, Question?

By combining fields, a search can be highly customized for any purpose.

Search Operators

Twitter also provides convenient search operators which allow the search parameters described above to be specified as simple text. Search operators make Advanced Search universally available through uniform text queries.

The default it to search for all words.
Use quotes to specify exact phrases, e.g. ”digital marketing”
Use OR to ask for any of the words, e.g. sales OR marketing
Use Exclude specific words with -, management -risk
Specify hashtags as #usual
Sent from or to a person, e.g from:om, to:pmarca
Mentioning an account, e.g. @scoutzen
Sent from a particular place, e.g. near:London within:25mi
Date range, e.g. since:2017-01-01 until:2017-01-31
Sentiment - positive :), negative :(, question ?
Containing links, filter:links
Without any URL links, filter:-links
Containing images, filter:images
Containing videos, filter:videos
Having a minimum number of retweets, min_retweets:10
Having a minimum number of favorites, min_faves:5

Using search operators, you can make the context unambiguous and the results more relevant.

Automating Twitter Search

You can always do ad-hoc, one-off searches on Twitter using Advanced Search parameters and operators described above. Ash Read at Buffer outlines two dozen different ways to use Advanced Search for marketing and sales, and is an excellent guide (even if you are not a Superhuman :)

For busy mortals, however, automation is the saving grace.

Daniel Knowlton has a great article on automating the discovery of leads. In addition to step-by-step instructions on using IFTTT to get email notification for search results, he also outlines smart strategies for search and engagement.

If your company uses Zapier, you can set up automation to send new search results to your inbox, phone, Slack or HipChat.

ScoutZen automates the search by gathering people with matching tweets and building lists. You can think of it as a long-running search to drive your campaigns and gather insights for promotions. In the next two sections, we will describe how to set up and use scouts to help with your goals.

ScoutZen and Advanced Search

ScoutZen will accept and apply any of these search operators within the criteria input field. It also lets you auto-complete a city and provide the radius in lieu of entering near: and within: operators.

Once the scout is created, it will start running. Depending on the search criteria, you may get results within a few minutes.

ScoutZen will continue running the scout, gathering results to automatically find people matching the criteria. You can then explore, filter and sort the results and export all or a subset of them to CSV.

While exploring the results, you can identify and remove from consideration specific people matches. This is functionally equivalent to an opt-out, ignore or block list. For example, you can remove affiliated Twitter accounts, or those of competitors, so as to simplify post-export usage. Profiles removed from consideration will not show up regardless of their future activity matching the scout criteria.

The exported CSV file contains detailed profile information which can be opened and viewed in Excel or uploaded to Google Sheets. Needless to say, you can also combine results from multiple scouts into a single campaign-specific spreadsheet. As you can imagine, these can form the basis of effective campaigns including tailored audiences for highly relevant Twitter Ads.

Nifty Ways to Apply Advanced Search

Now that we have covered the mechanics of settings up scouts using Advanced Search, let us highlight some useful applications which can benefit your marketing efforts.

It is important to keep in mind that tweets are conversations, not documents or blog posts, obviously. For best search results, your keywords and phrases should reflect the manner in which people talk to each other.

Gather all the people who share your blog posts and articles or reference you in their tweets.

People mentioning you in their tweets or sharing your content are already engaged with you. With ScoutZen, it is easy to maintain an ongoing list of your fans.

Find bloggers or authors who post content about topics you care about. In addition to learning from things they share, you can use the list to reach out in the future with your thoughts and contributions.

Let’s say we want to know all the people who shared this particular article. We can be very specific by searching for the link. Or we can broaden it smartly to build a more useful list of people.

4. People mentioning you or your industry peers

It’s obvious how to find people mentioning one account. But did you know how easy it is to find people mentioning any of a slew of companies or products? Just OR them all.

5. People NOT mentioning your competition

If someone is talking about a topic without mentioning any of your competitors, your chances at engagement and conversion are likely higher. It’s easy to do that by specifying keywords or phrases while excluding product or company names.

5. People unhappy with a product

In addition to monitoring your brand, you can also keep an eye out on how customers are talking about your competitors. Simply include the sentiment operators, along with product names or company handles. If you want to be specific, you can use the to: operator to look for people responding directly to a particular account.

If done right, not only can this list drive engagement and conversion, you are also likely to get ideas for new features and product improvement.

Don’t overlook the question ? sentiment. This can lead to people having questions about how to achieve a particular goal within a product. You might be able to help them or provide them with a better alternative.

Let’s say you provide video editing services and would like to reach out to people creating or sharing informational videos. Or if you want to make a list of companies putting out a screencast. It’s easy enough with the filter:videos operator.

Don’t forget the equivalent filter:images if you care about pictures and infographics.

7. People talking about you in a city

ScoutZen makes it particularly easy to find people talking about your brand in a certain location. The auto-suggest city picker eliminates guesswork in geo-names or tedious lat-long input. Simply pick the right city, specify the geographic coverage (e.g. 15 mi or 25km) and your search will be focused on that area.

8. People signaling intent to buy

You can create your own search templates specific to your product or niche in order to discover great opportunities and develop outreach. For example, “anyone recommend” OR “any advice” OR “need something” are good phrases to consider. These could be used in conjunction with any of the examples illustrated so far.

What’s Next

Those are just a few ideas for scouts you can use today to gather people, build lists and drive campaigns. Do you have any neat search tricks? We would love to hear them.

Start an advanced search scout now!

Export Members of Any Twitter List

Wed, 01 Feb 2017 23:00:00 +0000

Twitter lists are a great mechanism for discovering social communities and engaging with prospective followers. Industry insiders and influencers have created tens of thousands of public lists to enhance their Twitter presence.

Use them to your advantage with ScoutZen.

Read on to learn more.

Twitter Lists - A Primer

Twitter lists allow you to curate a group of Twitter users. You can then see a stream of tweets from those users on the list timeline. Anyone with a Twitter account can create upto 1,000 lists, each of which can have a maximum of 5,000 members per list.

Lists are a great way to read tweets from a select set of people. They are particularly useful to create an alternate timeline without following users. Even if you are following them, its useful to organize users into lists by topics or interests for convenience and efficiency.

A Twitter list can be either public or private. Public lists can be viewed or subscribed to by anyone. If you are added as a member to a public list, you will get notified via Twitter. This allows you to be aware of the list, understand its contents and check out the membership.

What if you could search by members by keywords in their bios? Would you like to know when competitors add new members to their list? How about building your own spreadsheet with data from multiple lists?

Here are details on creating and using Twitter lists from various clients and devices.

Benefits of Twitter Lists

Twitter lists can provide multiple benefits for a wide range of purposes.

As an organization mechanism, you can use Twitter lists to maintain groups of people by their interests, industry involvement or your personal categorization scheme. These lists and the associated timelines are seamlessly accessible from the desktop and all your devices for on-the-go usage.

Segmenting Twitter users into lists can help you be more efficient and productive. For example, you can keep up with important list of people daily to ensure you never miss their tweets amidst the bustle of your general timeline. At the same time, other lists can be checked once a week, or less frequently as needed.

Adding a member to a list is an act of curation. You are signaling to the world that you consider that set of Twitter user as key contributors or experts in the topic which the list is intended to reflect. Naturally, Twitter notifies users when they are added as list members. This encourages interaction and reciprocation.

Within a company or agency, Twitter lists can be used to help with marketing campaigns. This makes it easy to build and maintain tailored audiences based on a variety of criteria. This can benefit in terms of better engagement via Twitter Ads or other promotional efforts.

Public lists on Twitter are a great way to discover communities and gauge influencers. You can start with well-crafted, highly subscribed lists to find key members. Or you can view list memberships for a particular Twitter user, optionally considering the profiles of those who listed them.

Twitter Lists - Use Cases

As you can imagine, given the benefits, there are innumerable uses for Twitter lists. Below is just a small sample of how you can use Twitter lists:

Never miss tweets from colleagues or clients. Scan important list timelines and catch up quickly as part of your work flow.
Monitor your competitors’ tweets using a private list. This lets you track their activites through the list timeline without “following” them.
Connect with other attendees and speakers before getting to a conference. Especially useful to plan when re-attending next year.
Get the important news stories directly from respected institutions or people and journalists on the ground.
Build a list of people for outreach: bloggers, industry leaders, brand managers, digital influencers, etc.
Pay it forward by recommending people you know for specific skills or roles, either in a particular city or globally.

ScoutZen and Twitter Lists

ScoutZen makes it easy to gather all list members and understand more about them. Simply enter the list slug or URL of any public Twitter list to get started.

Within a few minutes, you can explore, search and sort all the list members. More importantly, ScoutZen will continually track the list, automatically getting new members added to the list on Twitter.

You can either export the full list of members, or just a subset by filtering on profile data such as bio, location, name, etc.

The exported CSV file can be easily opened in a spreadsheet and contains a wealth of data including website URLs where available.

You can also combine results from multiple list scouts to quickly build a comprehensive spreadsheet. This can be a huge timesaver for your campaign tasks.

Get started with Twitter lists now!

Search & Sort to Find & Follow

Mon, 17 Oct 2016 22:00:00 +0000

Now you can search and sort your Scout results, making your lists even smarter. With these latest tools, you can easily understand your audience and find potential outreach candidates.

Scouts provide results meeting some criteria or context, whether mentions, hashtags, followers or list members. Searching people within those results by keywords in their bio, is a powerful way to analyze a Twitter audience or community. This is effective for brand monitoring, event networking and other ways that twitter users gather around a topic.

ScoutZen lets you apply bio and location search to lists of people discovered through any type of scouts. For example:

Narrow Twitter hashtag and keyword search results by user bio and location.
Filter Twitter List members with search keywords
Search followers’ bios for company names, job titles, or industries.
Ditto: competitor’s followers to find new prospects and leads for your business.

Finally you can sort the entire results or just the search hits by most followers, most friends, most lists or most active to suit your needs.

Filter Hashtag Results

Let’s see this strategy in action by finding CEOs taking part in a popular Twitter Chat, #TwitterSmarter run by Twitter Marketing Strategist Madalyn Sklar.

First, create a Scout for the #TwitterSmarter hashtag, which will continually monitor Twitter for tweets with this hashtag. As results are gathered, you can filter for those with CEO in their bio and sort by followers.

You’ve just found Twitter loving CEOs!

While this example uses a job title to filter on, you could search for company name, industry or other terms to identify the best people to connect with further.

Use search for outreach

Your Twitter followers are already in your network. But, browsing through hundreds, thousands or more profiles can be a burden. While Twitter Audience Insights can provide a number of insights into your followers, there’s still nothing on Twitter to search your followers’ bios or sort them by follower count. With ScoutZen, create a Scout for your followers and search to quickly find people to re-connect or reach out.

Applying these same techniques for a competitor’s Twitter account can help you find leads and prospects. Kristi Hines article on how to use your competition’s Twitter presence is just as valid today and even easier with ScoutZen.

Analyze Twitter Lists

Let’s say you have a list of CMOs on Twitter. After building that great big list, how do you quickly find people for a given industry or niche? By now, you know the answer:

Search and sort help you find your way through hundreds of thousands of results quickly. In conjunction with CSV export, these tools can make your lists and workflow even more efficient.

Give it a try today!

How to Export Twitter Followers

Tue, 11 Oct 2016 23:30:00 +0000

A successful presence on Twitter naturally attracts thousands (or millions!) of followers. Most people may have some idea of who their followers are as they accumulate them over time. It’s useful, though, to be able to look at the whole list and better understand the overall picture.

ScoutZen makes it easy to export your followers by downloading a CSV file. In fact, you can scout the followers for any public Twitter user.

Scouts run continually, and the results can be viewed any time at scoutzen.com. The CSV download provides an alternative and powerful way to search and analyze a snapshot of your scout’s matches. Here are a few obvious examples:

Search bios

Whether you are looking for your next customer, recruiting candidates for a job listing, finding people in your industry, prospecting for leads by job title, or expanding your network, searching Twitter bios can give you an edge.

Find followers near you

Using your favorite spreadsheet application, you can easily sort and filter followers by location. Re-connect with the followers that are close to you.

Find influential followers

Sort your followers by their followers count to find powerful connections.

Monitor your competitors’ followers

Create a scout for your competitors’ Twitter followers to quickly find leads for your business. The CSV download gives you insight into what your competitors are doing to market their business and attract their customers.

Choose your favorite spreadsheet

The ScoutZen CSV download can be opened in Microsoft Excel, Apple Numbers, Google Sheets or your favorite spreadsheet application or text editor.

Getting Started

First, create a scout for the followers you want to analyze. Provide as criteria either your twitter @screen-name or that of any public twitter account.

ScoutZen will then go to work, creating and updating a list of the followers. Depending on the number of followers, this may take some time. In practice, it takes less than an hour to build up a list with hundreds of thousands of followers.

Download Followers

Once the scout has gathered all of the followers, go to the results tab and click the Download/Export button. Depending on how many profiles are in the results you will either get an immediate download or receive a link to download the CSV file.

File Format

The CSV file contains the following columns with Twitter profile information:

nickname / screen name
name
description (bio)
location
url
verified
#followers
#friends
#listed (number of Twitter Lists the person has been added to)
#statuses (number of times the person has tweeted)
joined (when the person joined Twitter)

Scouting for and exporting Twitter followers with ScoutZen is the quickest way to get a searchable, sortable, filterable database of yours or any public Twitter profile’s followers.

If you are on a paid plan, sign in to ScoutZen and set it up now. If you are on the Free plan, don’t worry. Just go to your Account settings and change plans to try out export absolutely FREE for 14 days.

Happy Scouting!

Sync lists to Twitter - Available in Beta

Mon, 01 Aug 2016 23:30:00 +0000

UPDATE: As of Feb 2017, sync to lists works with starred results.

ScoutZen now lets you sync your scout results to Twitter lists. If you are on a paid plan, sign in to ScoutZen and set it up now. If you are on the Free plan, don’t worry. Just go to your Account settings and change plans to try out sync features absolutely FREE for 14 days.

Read on for more details.

Scouts run continually gathering results matching your criteria. These results can always be browsed from within ScoutZen. However, by syncing them to Twitter you can see the list timeline in your favorite Twitter client. Here is how the Sync setup looks like if you go to the Settings tab for your selected Scout.

Provide the Twitter list name to sync to
Select the sync criteria, including the maximum number of results
Choose if you want the Twitter list to be public or private
Check “Enable Sync” to get the sync running

Twitter List Creation

If the Twitter list with the name you provide does not exist, ScoutZen will create it with the appropriate public or private setting you specify. If the list already exists, ScoutZen will keep it in sync based on the sync conditions you specify.

IMPORTANT! The sync is one-way only. The Twitter list is kept in sync with the Scout results. Any items or changes to the Twitter list may not be retained unless they are part of the Scout results and meet the sync conditions.

Sync Selection

Twitter lists can have no more than 5000 members. However, it is very easy to have scouts gathering tens of thousands of results. For example, when a Scout is tracking followers of some account, or monitoring a very popular hashtag. Sync conditions help you get the best results while staying under the limit of Twitter list members.

Simply specify the maximum number (upto 5000) sorted by descending number of:

Followers
Friends
List memberships
Tweets
Recent Activity

Scout results will be sorted to gather the appropriate candidates for syncing with the Twitter list.

FAQ & Technical Details

Every Scout can sync to its own Twitter list. As long as you are on the paid plan (or trialing it).
Each Scout can sync to just own Twitter list at a time. You can always change the Twitter list it syncs to.
The sync is subject to Twitter API rate limits, including unpublished throttling.
A large initial sync might take several days to sync up. Incremental changes should be kept in sync on a daily basis.

So try it out, and let us know if any questions or feedback.

As you can imagine, in addition to accomodating Twitter list membership limits, sync selection can efficiently enable other use cases for your marketing and outreach. We will be detailing some of these soon. So stay posted on more news and tips from ScoutZen.

ESPN World Fame 100 — On Twitter

Mon, 20 Jun 2016 20:37:19 +0000

The ESPN World Fame 100 is an attempt to create a ranking, through statistical analysis, of the 100 most famous athletes on the planet. ESPN director of sports analytics Ben Alamar created a formula that combined athletes’ salary/winnings and endorsements with their social media following — Facebook, Twitter and Instagram — along with Google search popularity to create a comparative ranking system.

We started off by making a Twitter list which includes these athletes. Or the 94 out of 100 which are on Twitter. (More on the missing 6 later). Check it out to get a combined stream of all their tweets and interactions on Twitter.

The Six Not on Twitter

While ESPN has not published the actual weighting and normalization formula, we assume they treated these as having zero Twitter followers. Obviously they made the cut on factors (wins/loss/salary) other than social media.

#38 Peyton Manning, NFL
#52 Tom Brady, NFL
#62 Frank Lampard, MLS
#66 Eli Manning, NFL
#69 Andrew Luck, NFL
#97 Kimi Raikkonen, F1

The NFL stars are overrepresented here. Or could it be that they are not with the Twitter generation? And perhaps Tom Brady leaves Twitter to Gisele and her 4.2M followers.

The Twitter Numbers

For the 94 that are on the list, we crunched some numbers. These are the median numbers for these 100 famous athletes when it comes to Twitter.

#Followers: 2,135,909
#Friends: 231
#Tweets: 2960
#Listed: 7581

And here are the athletes with the most for each of these categories.

Most followers: Cristiano Ronaldo (41.5M)
Most friends: DwightHoward (7.7K)
Most tweets: Neymar Jr (40.6K)
Most Listed: Cristiano Ronaldo

Tennis player Andy Murray has been on Twitter since the earliest days of March

While boxing champ Manny Pacquiao joined recently in July 2015.

Of course, each of these athletes may prefer communicating primarily using Facebook or Instagram. Eight have linked their Facebook profile while at least two link to their Instagram account.

Build your own lists

Making a list is just the beginning. Subscribe to the ESPN World Fame 100 list and keep up with these athletes on Twitter. Once you build lists, you can also find insights and trends within activity.

If you are interested in automating list building and deeper analysis, sign up for ScoutZen. Tell us your needs and see how we can help you.

The 2016 Time 100 … on Twitter

Fri, 22 Apr 2016 20:37:19 +0000

Time Magazine published its annual list of The 100 Most Influential People yesterday, presenting a list with a mix of household names and newly discovered people which you may not have heard of.

The first question I had was: How many of the the 100 go to Twitter when they have something to say? You may remember Fred Wilson’s post back in February, about the The Twitter Contradiction and this list is a compelling test case for his contention that:

Twitter is where people who have something to say go to say it.

The second question I had was: Is there a Twitter List for this list? There is now with the Twitter List we’ve built for this year’s Time 100 class. Go subscribe to easily stay up to date on what this class is talking about.

A quick analysis

With the Twitter List setup, we can use some of the tools we’re building to analyze The Time 100 Twitter profiles.

Out of the 100, 69 of them are on Twitter. That could be debatable with some accounts that may not really be that person. And, similarly, many of the accounts are run by staff, not the person themselves. But, 2/3 presence on Twitter is a pretty good start. 49 of the 69 are currently verified. It appears The Verified account team at Twitter has some work to do today.

On the other hand, you may find it a relief that nearly a third of the Time 100 class of influencers are not on Twitter. Based on this fact, people that are working hard, doing great things but have not jumped into social media can likely feel no obligation to do so.

After exporting into a spreadsheet, we can get some aggregate stats on the group.

Median Followers: 596,584
Median Friends: 348
Median Tweets: 3602
Median number of Twitter Lists on: 3776

Popularity contest for the popularity contest

It should come as no surprise that entertainers, politicians, journalists and athletes have a significant Twitter presence. The top 10 most followed on this list are:

Guo Pei, a Chinese fashion designer has the fewest.

Early Adopter in Chief

President Obama also leads the way as an early adopter, having joined Twitter the earliest of all of those on in the list, back in March 2007 while Human Rights Activist Nadia Murad joined this past December and has the newest Twitter account.

Tweet, Tweet

Ariana Grande’s account is the chattiest of the bunch. But, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Nicki Minaj and Donald Trump have also tweeted over 30,000 times and are not far behind.

Is Tweeting hazardous to your influence or even career?

Here’s a quick rundown of those without a Twitter presence. They tend to fall into a few categories: military/security, foreign government officials, artists and scientists and Twitter competitors. I can imagine that Twitter could be viewed as a security risk in some of these circles. But for artists and scientists, it is interesting to see them opt-out, are they focused on their work more than others?

Shelley Hwang
Dan Carder
Marc Edwards
Kathy Niakan
Kip Thorne
Yuri Milner
Mohammed bin Nayef
Wang Jianlin
Kathleen Kennedy
Priscilla Chan
Mark Zuckerberg
Elena Ferrante
Ryan Coogler
Oscar Isaac
Mark Rylance
Yayoi Kusama
Kim Jong Un
Diana Natalicio
Lori Robinson
Queen Máxima
James Comey
Raghuram Rajan
Sergio Moro
Xi Jinping
Tsai Ing-wen
Sean MacFarland
Jin Liqun
Angela Merkel
Marilynne Robinson
Alejandro González Iñárritu
Tu Youyou

Most likely to follow you

These Influential people have the highest follow-back ratio, so if you’d like to connect on Twitter with one, these are your best chances:

On the other side, there’s very little chance of @azizansari following you since the “Pasta Lover” currently follows 0 people.

About those Twitter Lists

Ironically, looking back at the Twitter Lists launch, Time was mentioned in the lead of the post. Twitter Lists have long been one of those features that many Twitter fans love and find incredibly useful, yet Twitter invests very little in the lists feature.

If you like lists, Twitter or otherwise, and doing this type of scouting and analysis is of interest, we invite you to sign up for ScoutZen and help build the future of list building.