With the ever-changing Google Algorithm and increased Google penalties, link building has become more challenging than ever. Recent Google penalties to Rap Genius & Expedia (still speculative) continue to show why white hat link building strategies are so important. According to this article on Search Engine Roundtable, Expedia lost 25% of their Google traffic overnight. That’s a major drop off.

Not Your Everyday Link Building

With link building becoming a little tougher, finding good, efficient strategies is a must. One that has been increasingly successful for us has been using Twitter followers. Simply pulling Twitter followers along with their data and exporting it into an Excel spreadsheet is an extremely effective strategy for link building. You now have a list of websites that are likely to have an interest in your brand. This is a much more strategic approach than sifting through sites and sending emails to individuals who aren’t aware or interested in your company. By utilizing this strategy, you can be certain that the individuals receiving your emails are familiar with your brand and will be open to the idea of working with you.

Granted, this strategy is more likely to work more efficiently and provide more opportunities with a bigger, more well-known brand with a large social following. However, this should not deter you if you aren’t a powerhouse brand with a massive social following. You will still have opportunities waiting there for you. Admittedly, it may be less than others, but it’s still something that can work for many companies.

There are many tools you can use to pull these reports. We at Teknicks are a big fan of Moz, so we use Followerwonk to pull our reports. It is a MOZ app, so to use it you must have an account with MOZ. The following 12 steps are a breakdown of how to generate these reports.

The Play-by-Play

Step 1.               Go to Followerwonk.com

Step 2.               Sign into account via Twitter

Step 3.               Once logged in, click the “Analyze followers” tab

Step 4.               Once on the “Analyze followers” tab, enter your Twitter handle here                 (e.g. @TWITTERHANDLE)

Step 5.               Once Twitter handle is entered, change drop-down box to the right to “Analyze followers”

Step 6.               After steps 5 & 6 are done, click the “Do it” button and it will begin generating your report. If a screen doesn’t pop up click the “your reports” link

Step 7.               After clicking “your reports”, scroll to the bottom and find your report

Step 8.               After you click your report, it will bring you to your followers analysis page. To finish converting your report to a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, click “view all”

Step 9.               After you click “view all”, a screen will pop up showing you all of your Twitter follwers. Click the download button in the top right corner to convert to an Excel spreadsheet

Step 10.            After clicking the download button, the following screen will pop up telling you how long your report will take to convert to a spreadsheet and also letting you choose whether you want it in .CSV or .XLS format. Just click on which one you prefer.

Step 11.            After choosing which format you want, it will bring you back to the “your reports” page and your latest report should be right at the top

Step 12.            Click your report and with some sorting & hiding columns you don’t want, here is the finished product.

Once you export the report, you need to begin evaluating the data. You can filter the data by social authority, URL or number of tweets. Once you begin analyzing, you’ll want to make sure each URL you collect is authoritative and relevant. Next, find the contact and craft a personalized email. Most of the sites you contact will be ecstatic that you are reaching out to them personally and more than happy to work together. Though this may sound easy, the email is still very important. When reaching out, you should acknowledge that they follow you on Twitter and graciously thank them. This minor line of gratitude is one of the most important elements of the pitch. It lets them know that your company does value its fans/customers and helps add that personal touch.

The Results

After implementing this strategy, we saw awesome results. Take a look for yourself!

Graph #1

Graph #2

Have you also used Twitter followers as a strategy? Are you seeing similar results to those above?

If you haven’t at least given it some thought by now, I strongly urge you to think about it. Or maybe you are too busy implementing a different strategy that has been very successful and would like to share. We would love to hear all about it!