One of the most frequent issues that many of my NGO clients have is connecting with people who are truly interested in their issues on Twitter. While it’s easy to find followers, it’s much more difficult to find relevant followers.
For the last few years I frequently recommended using SocialBro (now: “Audiense”) because it had a very nifty feature that made it easy to do just that: you could search for a phrase or hashtag with AND/OR/NOT operators, see who is using this term and then filter the results by number of followers, language, whether you already follow them or not etc..
While a lot of tools offer a keyword search across Twitter profiles, SocialBro searched the actual tweets. This is a very important difference, because what a person tweets about is far more relevant than how he/she describes him/herself in the bio. Think about it: it is far more likely that someone interested in climate change has used #climatechange in a tweet than in his bio.
Unfortunately, with the name-change to Audiense, SocialBro also changed their pricing. While you used to be able to do this type of search as part of your normal subscription, you now have to pay 150 USD to buy a package of 50,000 results based on your queries, in addition to your monthly subscription fee.
Below is the short list of alternatives I have found so far. If you have experience using any of them, please leave a comment below. The listed prices do not include possible non-profit discounts.
I’m not a huge fan of Commun.it because I don’t like their interface and the constant nagging to upgrade is driving me nuts. But when it comes to identifying users worth following, they are doing things slightly ­better than Mention: Commun.it shows either a “follow” or an “unfollow” button next to each name making it much easier to go through the list. Unfortunately, it’s not possible to filter the results so you still have to scroll past users you are already following.
If you thought Commun.it’s interface was bad, don’t even think about looking at Socialoomph. Setting up an alert has the charm of configuring a Wifi Router. However, if you don’t mind that, then there is a lot to like: Socialoomph has a lot of configuration options and you can search for up to five keywords at any given time. I particularly like that you can easily choose between following someone or adding him/her to a Twitter list.
With all the tools that I have listed so far, finding people is one of many features. Refollow, on the other hand, is a one-trick pony that focuses only on helping you decide who to follow and unfollow. For the purpose of finding people based on hashtags or keywords it is by far my favourite, since it comes closest to what I used to do with Socialbro. Whether that functionality alone is worth 20 USD/month is something only you can answer. With Refollow you can easily set criteria to identify people talking about certain topics and you can filter the results so that you only see those that you are not already following. The interface is very clean, but unfortunately some of the settings are a bit hard to interpret.
Have you used any of these tools? Can you recommend one that wasn’t mentioned? Please leave a comment!