How to find out where your Twitter followers are
I've been looking for a social media tool for a while now to tell me where in the world my Twitter followers are. And I'm not alone: it's something that I discussed with Joanna Penn on a recent podcast. I'd previously used the (now apparently defunct) Twitteranalyzer to give me an idea of this – but we were both bemoaning the current lack of such a useful tool.
Of course, immediately after the interview, I discovered a new one: Twocation. This is a great free tool that gives you a lot of information about where your followers are. Every country is listed, along with a percentage score. Make sure you're logged in to the Twitter account you want to analyze, go to www.twocation.com, and click the big green 'Calculate and Tweet' button. This requires you to authorize the app to use your Twitter account – but it's safe to do so, and you don't need to enter any login details.
As well as giving you a detailed breakdown, this will automatically tweet the following sort of tweet from your account, listing your top three locations and with a link back to Twocation. You could delete this, of course – though it seems a small price to pay to use the service, and both the stats and the app may both be of interest to your followers.
#bbpBox_133540020450627584 a { text-decoration:none; color:#759e28; }#bbpBox_133540020450627584 a:hover { text-decoration:underline; }My followers live in the U.S. (38.2%), the U.K. (37%) & Canada (4.6%) [top 3]. Find yours at http://t.co/NpNQt24N
40 minutes ago via Twocation
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Jon ReedSo, I now know that 38.2% of the followers of @getuptospeed are in the US, 37% are in the UK and 4.6% in Canada. I also know the (smaller) percentages for every other country.
Why would you want to know where your followers are? For me, knowing that a majority of my followers are in the US reminds me not to make my tweets too UK-centric – and, in my case, to include links to the US edition of Get Up to Speed as well as the UK one.
For my @publishingtalk account, where I have over 170,000 followers, a majority of whom are in the US, this is even more important -I don't want my tweets to be irrelevant to over 85,000 followers! It also influences the time of day I tweet. This is the other good reason for knowing where your followers are. For me, there's not much point in tweeting before lunchtime in the UK, as America hasn't woken up yet.
If you are targeting specific geographic markets with your business, it pays to be aware of where your followers are, and if you are attracting enough of them in the places you want to. If you aren't, think about ways you can attract more of them. If it doesn't matter to you where your followers are – if you are location-agnostic – use it to be aware of which timezones people are living in, and when would be the optimum time to tweet, or to pre-schedule your tweets with HootSuite.
It may even surprise you where some of your followers are, and spark ideas for new business opportunities.
Find out more about Twitter in Get Up to Speed with Online Marketing (UK | US), Chapter 13: "Tap into Twitter – How to use the power of the real-time web to build a following" or in The Publishing Talk Guide to Twitter .
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