5 Tools to Research the Demographics of Your Twitter Followers


Many of us find ourselves with a bit of a problem. We have plenty of followers on our Twitter accounts, and yet we are getting next to no retweets, mentions or overall benefits from those followers.

Because of that, many people think that the whole Twitter marketing thing is all hype. After all, they seem to be doing everything right but they have nothing to show for it except for a lot of wasted time, and more aggravation than it was worth.

Of course, interaction is not easy to build. Many people give up earlier than achieving it. One of the first steps to take: Learn more about your followers.

For those who are experiencing the same problem as I described above, below are some great apps that will let you get the proper stats to start engaging your followers in a real and dynamic way.

Research Your Twitter Followers’ Demographics

1. SalesForce Marketing Cloud

twitter followers

This is a full marketing service aimed at professionals who need something a little more extensive than the average analytics app. It has a full social listening feature that will help to break down your overall Twitter follower use, as well as all data coming from your profiles.

Find out the conversation going on surrounding your brand, then find context within those conversations for better targeting of your marketing campaign. Additionally, SalesForce Marketing Cloud also has social content, engagement, social ads, workflow and automation, measurement, and packages for basic, professional, corporate and enterprise use.

2. SoDash

twitter followers

Another large social monitoring app, you can find out who is following you and how to engage them, all while looking after the competition and generating leads. Their brand management tool is incredibly easy to use, and everything is put within a single dashboard for you to view at any time.

It is all based on machine learning and smart tagging, which gives it a unique format that has been boosting its popularity over the last couple of months.

3. Birdsong

twitter followers

Do a quick analytics search of any social media profile and find out exactly what conversations your brand is generating. That includes through followers, who you can target more efficiently while still improving your visibility for reaching out to new demographics.

This tool will connect with third parties to get a more complete picture of your social media use and reach. Then, it will tell you what you need to do to be more effective and efficient, all through an easy to read pie chart. There are four different tool options: agencies, brands, journalists and small businesses.

4. KnowYourFollowers

twitter followers

Break down your followers into just the information you need to know. Get stats on country, U.S. state, gender, interests, who else they follow, their jobs and more. All of these demographics are broken down by both numbers and percentages, so you can see how to better customize your content to appeal to those segments.

You can even find out their marital status, number of children, income levels, education…everything you could possibly need. There is a small map showing the city locations of followers, though it isn’t that extensive in that regard.

5. Ad.ly

twitter followers

Target your ads by follower using celebrity endorsement as the driving force. This advertising service works by leveraging the content that your followers share or read in order to optimize results. It will use ads designed specifically around their chosen celebrities to create a conversation between the celeb and the user.

Your brand’s visibility will be the end result. Very cool idea, and very effective. They have the largest digital celebrity network, as well.

Do you have a tool that should be on this list?


More in: 69 Comments ▼

Ann Smarty Ann Smarty is the founder of Viral Content Bee, a social media marketing platform, and the founder of SEO Smarty, an SEO consulting and link building agency.

69 Reactions
  1. Valentine Belonwu

    Hi Ann,
    Thanks for sharing these useful tools, I will check them out to see how it works.

    Thanks for the list 🙂

  2. Great roundup, Ann! I haven’t heard of a couple of these, so I’m going to give them a look.

    One I would add to the list is Sprout Social. If you use their management platform, you get age and gender demographic information for your followers.

  3. Thanks for the inclusion in this article 🙂 We are also working on understanding more about the followers through their Twitter biographies http://birdsongdtt.com/2013/03/can-twitter-biographies-help-you-understand-your-followers/

  4. Martin Lindeskog

    Do you think that Twitter will launch their own demographics tool sometime in the future?

    • Martin, I want to hope. Currently their advertising reports are quite limited though – they need to start showing that data to their advertisers at least!

  5. What a great list of resources. Thanks for the tips as well!

  6. Something missing from this is the quality of the Twitter data. It is not all created equal; bad data in equal bad data out. There are only two companies that have the Full Twitter Firehose (all of the tweets!) out there. Also, check to see if the platforms you are using are Twitter certified.

    Marketwired is Twitter Certified and has the full Twitter Firehose of data in both their Heartbeat and MAP platforms, so you are not missing any influencers or their tweets.

    Apples to Oranges with most tools out there. The space is crowded with tools that seem cool but just don’t have the engine to back it up.

  7. Awesome tools. Thanks for sharing them with us.

    Ti

  8. You missed the grand-daddy of Twitter analytics tools — @PeekAnalytics!

    Analyze the demographics of 500K followers or mentions for free.

    Sample report – http://peekanalytics.com/demo#/analytics?us=hardaway&dis_us=hardaway

  9. Great post, and thanks for including “Know Your Followers”.

    To update this – We launched a vastly improved version of Know Your Followers under the name “Demographics Pro for Twitter”, which includes much more detailed data, plus powerful tools to compare accounts, search for influencers, and research keywords & #hashtags:
    http://www.demographicspro.com/

    The new service is also available as a free HootSuite app:
    http://www.demographicspro.com/hootsuite-app

    And we power demographics on many popular social listening dashboards who have integrated with our API. Anyone can sign up for a free evaluation account now, at our site http://www.demographicspro.com/

  10. Have to say, SEOSmarty for the win 🙂

    But honestly, Ann, great list!

  11. Really nice article.
    Also here is a suggestion you can add one more twitter analytics tool that is followeraudit
    it provides you with a lots of detailed information like
    -Track Twitter Follower & Following Growth of Any Twitter User
    -Track Twitter Followers and Following of Your Competitor
    -Get Precise Follower Growth Statistics
    -Get followers growth metrics on a graph
    -Weekly and Daily visual representation of followers over graph
    for more details visit the site https://www.followeraudit.com/
    I hope you find my suggestion helpful