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Does Your Social Media Audience AlsoFollow Your Competitors?By Kevin Shively – April 8, 2015

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Even if you know the basics about your social audience and your competitors’ tactics, youcould be missing out on some important insight:

Which of your followers also follow your competitors?

This audience segment may be your

New Research on Twitter Users Who

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most important. These people areclearly interested in your industry,and they’re getting exposed tomessaging that could convince themto buy from your competitorsinstead of you.

In this post, I’ll walk through some simple ways to analyze the audience segment that youshare with your competitors.

In our recent research of one million users who follow brands on Twitter, we found thatmany competitive brands see an overlap of around one-quarter of their audience.

New Research on Twitter Users WhoFollow Brands

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If you’re a regular reader, you’ve heard me preach about the importance of using a completesocial analytics framework. It creates standards and processes for both planning andmeasurement throughout the social marketing cycle.

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When conducting social analysis, it’s important to keep in mind that the components in theplanning stage don’t live in silos. There is some overlap in how they’re conducted and theinsight you can gain.

In this case, conversation and competitive analysis go hand-in-hand, but how do you do it?

How to Analyze Followers You Share with a CompetitorThe first step will be to collect data on both your followers, and those of your chosencompetitor.

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At the risk of sounding too promotional, SIMPLY MEASURED IS THE GREATEST ANALYTICSPRODUCT EVER. Okay just kidding, but I’m also serious. There are many ways to get audienceintelligence from Twitter, but one of the easiest is to run a Simply Measured TwitterAudience Analysis Report on both your brand and your chosen competitor. This report isavailable in our Free Report Marketplace, even if you’re not a current Simply Measuredcustomer (although the free version caps out at 10,000 followers).

Regardless of the way you collect your user data, you’ll want to aggregate a list of followersfor each account with as much info as possible.

Gathering Follower Details

In the Simply Measured Twitter Follower Report, this list can be found in the “Follower List”tab. If you’re pulling data using a .CSV file or another service, make sure you include as muchdata as you can get access to in order to make your analysis even more rich.

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This tab tells you several things about the followers of any public Twitter account: Screenname, name, profile bio, location, website, followers, users they follow, how many lists they’reincluded on, lifetime Tweets, location (time zone), when they created their account, the lasttime they Tweeted, Klout score, and top Klout topics.

Combining Lists

Since you’ll have follower lists from two separate accounts, you’ll want to copy these detailsfrom one report into the other, to put them all in the same place. In the Simply MeasuredReport, you can copy the contents of the Follower List tab directly from one report to theother.

Once your follower lists for both brands are in the same Excel tab, you’ll want to tack acolumn onto the end.

For simplicity’s sake, I’m going to focus specifically on how information is organized in theSimply Measured report.

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Filtering Users

Now you need to remove the users who don’t follow both accounts.

Column A is populated with the username of each follower. Start with the Excel formula =COUNTIF(A:A, A2) in your newly created column, and drag it down to populate each row(example: for row 21, use =COUNTIF(A:A, A21)). This formula will result in a number value ofeither a “1” or a “2” for each row. The “1” will indicate followers that only appear once, andthe “2” will indicate followers that appear in both accounts’ follower lists.

Sort your list in descending order, then select and remove the rows with a “1” in your newcolumn so you only have users that showed up twice.

De-Duping the List

This is your list of overlapped followers, but there are double entries, since followers stillappear from both brands’ lists.

This is easy to fix. Highlight column A, and click the “Remove Duplicates” option in the“Data” toolbar.

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Once again, sort your list in descending order by column A, and delete the rows that havehad the user name removed. You now have a list of the followers you share with yourcompetitor, and if you’re using the Simply Measured Twitter Follower Report, your charts tabwill have dynamically updated to reflect the new list, and give you details like the topkeywords from user profiles, follower distribution, Klout topics, and time zones.

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Kevin ShivelyAs Sr. Content Marketing Manager, editor of the Simply Measured blog, cohost ofthe #SimplyMeasured podcast, and generally delightful person, my job is to tellstories to the internet...You're welcome internet.

To learn more about the types of insight you can gain from competitive follower analysis,check out our new research that compares 100,000 followers each from ten top brands.

Get everything you need to analyze the metrics that matter

New Research onTwitter Users WhoFollow Brands

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amarareps • 4 days ago

This is really awesome actually. I like this a lot, and I've bookmarked this so that I look at these metrics for futurereports. I love how down and dirty you guys get with the data. Thanks for all of your great posts! :)

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