For many construction marketers who are creating social media plans or are already participating in social media, their first task should have been to find out whether their audience is using Twitter (or not) as a communication tool. If they are, then there is potential to engage with this audience and achieve valuable business goals such as lead generation, brand awareness, relationship development, research and general networking.
So how do you go about finding your audience?
I came across this handy tool the other day called Follower Wonk. It basically allows you to find Twitter users by searching for keywords within their biographies. Most professionals’ bios contain their job title, who they work for or which industry they work in.
So to help product manufacturers to kick start their social media campaigns, we have created a list of Architects within the UK on Twitter using Follower Wonk.
I have managed to find 387 U.K. Twitter users who have the keywords ‘Architect’ and ‘Architecture’ within their biographies. This list excludes Architects who are from the computer or software sector, although there may be one or two who have slipped my eye – apologies in advance.
NOTE: Some Twitter users may be missing from the list if they don’t have ‘architect’ or ‘architecture’ within their bio’s or do not state their location as UK. If you do know of any please add them via the comments section.
So here it is: List of U.K. Architects on Twitter
Hope it helps!
I just got a DM from someone who said ‘you’ve got more followers than the RIBA’ and a link to this post… thanks! (I think…)
Thank you Ayaan for the Tweet. This Follower Wonk really is a great tool, it was mentioned to me by Derek Mynott and you’ve been kind enough to take it a stage further. I am certain it will save people days, maybe more, of tedious (but sometimes very fruitful) work. I appreciate very much that Pauley Creative not only do some excellent research, but in the true sense of Social Media camaraderie are always happy to share the results. To me, that speaks volumes and I thank you. Great work!
Thanks to both of you for taking the time to comment. What a handy tool this is, especially when searching for your target audience. Am glad that you found it useful and hopefully product manufacturers looking for architects will make good use of such a list! We are always happy to help and conducting valuable research is part of that!
Well done to Su for your ever expanding followers list, a sign that you are a great resource in our industry. Keep up the tweeting!
One of the difficulties with identifying people who are in our industry and using twitter is that they don’t necessarily state in their bios.
I did a survey at the end of 2009 (for the emap construction marketing conference) which turned up several people who work for larger construction and property firms, for example, who don’t mention it in their bios because they think (and they might be right) that their employers won’t like it. One of them worked for a large commercial estate agency (which also does professional services). Another ran a local branch of a national professional services membership organisation. The latter had two twitter accounts, one for the branch, and one for him, but his personal one didn’t mention that he was also an engineer in one of the larger firms.
The downside for tools like FollowerWonk is that they only find people from their profile text, so hence they only find 3-400 UK construction people:
http://followerwonk.com/bio/?q=construction+-%22under+construction%22&l=UK%7CIreland&n=&frmin=&frmax=&flmin=&flmax=
Not a bad list, and it probably could be improved with additional keywords.
Another way to find specific industry people on twitter is to blatently advertise that you are looking for them. I started doing that in April 2009, using my blog and a dedicated twitter acocunt. So far I have found and followed nearly 1500:
http://twitter.com/ukconstruction
It is frustrating to have to continually justify the value of the tool to the sceptics by numbers isn’t it? After all, whilst numbers help, especially for crowdsourcing and getting the word out, the true value lies in the quality of the individuals using the tool, and how well they use it, and for what. That’s a lot more difficult to measure…