My Most Engaged Follower On Twitter Is @JenniferPreston

My most engaged follower on Twitter this past week is Jennifer Preston.  I know why Jennifer, who is the VP at the Knight Foundation is one of my engaged followers this week.   Earlier this week I was in Miami to do a social media pre-workshop at the Knight Digital Media Seminar.  Jennifer was observing and tweeting during the session.  (If you want to read the re-caps or view the videos for the seminar itself, the Knight Foundation blog has full documentation here).
On the other hand,  my most influential followers is Ellen DeGeneres.  I’m not sure why as I don’t follow the account.
That’s what I learned by using a new social analytics tool called SocialRank.
If you want to create value from your online professional network or your organization’s followers, you need to know your network, engage with your network, and build relationships.   But, with so many opportunities to connect on so many different platforms, how do you manage it all?  You need some analysis tools.
SocialRank is a tool that helps you understand your followers on your Twitter and now Instagram.   It pulls in your followers and their profiles and you can do sorts for most engaged, most influential, most followers, and alphabetical. You can get all the details of their social footprint in a few clicks.   It also lets you export the information into a spreadsheet.     Further, you can filter the lists by geographic location, bio keyword, or organization.   And for now, it is free.
Understanding your followers to find influencers or people you want to connect with to help you reach a goal isn’t a difficult task.  It requires a little “desk research.”  But that doesn’t have be done manually – and SocialRank takes the grunt work out of it.    SocialRank recently announced adding a new tool to help analyze your followers on Instagram with the same sorts and filters it offers for Twitter.
What can you do with this data?   Knowing your audience paves the way for engaging and building relationships.     You can acknowledge your “most valuable grammers” as the Red Cross has done in the example below or give a shout out to your most engaged followers by tagging them as in this example.

But maybe you are wondering why building relationships and engagement is worth your time.    We know that it is getting harder and harder to capture people’s attention.   According to Ben Parr’s recent book, Captivology: The Science of Capturing People’s Attention acknowledge is an attention trigger.   For nonprofits, if we can capture attention that leads to engagement, a deeper relationship – such as volunteering or donating follows.
Do you know who your most engaged or influential followers are on social channels?  How do you capture their attention?