If you are a blogger and are interested into why and how to best use Twitter for marketing, keep reading for an introduction to web scraping, why Twitter is the best place to use it, and how it will make your life much easier and improve your Twitter marketing strategy!
As marketing becomes more interactive between businesses and customers than ever before, there is no better time to streamline your strategy. When running your own blog, you need to seek out every potential time saver you can find. After all, the more time you can spend writing and marketing your work, the better. The less time you have to spend researching and doing backend work, the larger you can grow your audience and more you can monetize your work. There are all sorts of tools and techniques out there promising to help you take your blog to the next level. Just browse through the different WordPress plugins on the market. Everything from SEO to writing help to social media integration tools are vying for your attention and your wallet.
Speaking of social media, if you’re a blogger then chances are you have some presence on the major networks, especially Twitter. As with anything social media, there are likewise dozens of different tools that promise to streamline and economize your Twitter experience. However, one technique stands out above the rest for bloggers looking to get something out of Twitter. That technique is web scraping.
Web scraping will help you take a common sense approach to researching your customers’ interests and minimizing your effort in that process. Many businesses have latched onto web scraping, but few have used it on Twitter where it is especially useful.
What is scraping?
Web scraping with a software user automates the otherwise tedious process of pulling huge quantities of data off of websites, and then it succinctly displays that data for your use. This tremendously reduces the amount of time you spend learning about these websites, so that you can spend more time actually using the data you’ve found. Scraping a web page entails picking a software user like Scraper API, which fetches the desired web page by downloading it for processing. It then saves the data to a spreadsheet or a local file, so you don’t have to copy it manually. You can copy lists of names, URLs, phone numbers, or other information you need. More interestingly, you can use web scraping to conduct your marketing on Twitter.
Why Twitter?
There has never been an easier time to reach your target customer base. There are plenty of social media platforms you could choose to scrape, but if you think about what Twitter is, you realize that it really is the place to go to stay up to date, especially as a blogger. With its hundreds of millions of users, it covers every interest under the sun and is growing and updating constantly. Its popularity ensures that it will continue to grow and that the accounts that you need for your web scraping are available.
You can use a software user to scrape tweets or other essential information to find the keywords of your choice. Once the data is scraped, it can be crawled and formatted to provide you with updates to keep you in the know. There are all sorts of different types of information that you can scrape from Twitter that can provide all sorts of insights for you. Knowing what to pull when and how best to incorporate those insights into your writing is what will allow you to make the most out of scraping and to take your blogging experience to the next level. If you want to take this beyond Twitter, tools like Buzzsumo can be extremely helpful as well.
Know your customers
Word spreads fast on Twitter. In 280 characters or less, people are constantly talking business whether they realize it or not: sharing recommendations and praises, warnings and condemnations. Of course, when users air their opinions on the platform, they will be sure to tag (or hashtag) the account about which they are tweeting. This is obviously most significant if they are tweeting about you. As a blogger, Twitter is the perfect platform for you to market on. Of course, you can’t quite control all of this marketing since you can’t control what people are saying about your brand. You can only influence it by providing the sort of high quality content that they need and expect from you.
Scraping the timelines of your followers and customers will key you in to their honest thoughts. It can show you what they expect from you and what you can do to better. Instead of finding yourself out of your customers’ good graces, you can anticipate any issues and prepare accordingly. You can stay on top of the buzz about your business without monitoring Twitter full-time, scrolling through each of your followers’s timelines. Your customers would reap the benefits of your adaptability when you adjust your strategies to meet their needs.
These insights can allow you to make the most out of your Twitter marketing. Using a proper scraping tool will aggregate the data for you so that you can easily browse it and glean insights. You can see what went over all and what didn’t. Maybe your audience had a more positive reaction to this Tweet about this article and a negative reaction to another. Incorporate all of this into your writing and your marketing on Twitter.
Know your industry
People on Twitter are responsive by necessity. The only way to build a prominent profile is to listen to and interact with followers. Thus, popular influencers are more likely to respond to direct messages on Twitter than on other social media platforms. If you scrape influencers that work in an area similar enough to yours, you can understand what works well for them and use it for your own marketing.
For instance, perhaps your next article is about fall fashion trends. You want to get an idea of what is coming up for this season and gather all this information in a concise and coherent guide for your followers and the readers of your blog. By scraping the different influencers in this niche (perhaps not just fashion but fall fashion trends in your part of the country among a certain income group) you will be able to gather all this information much quicker than if you did so manually. Of course, if you have some coding experience, you can also create your own web scraping tools.
When you scrape influencer profiles, you can see what their followers like and retweet on Twitter, and you can gain an understanding for the specific type of content they post. After you’ve gained this understanding, you can use your knowledge of the influencer’s interests to your advantage when you direct message them. Remember, a personalized message will always be much more efficient than a generic one that you spam out to dozens of different people.
Know yourself
Your Twitter account projects how your customers will see you. It is vital that you make a positive impression not only to maintain your polished stature, but to attract new customers and readers when your current followers mention you. You can keep tabs on when you are mentioned by other accounts via notifications and gauge their impression of you. Checking these mentions manually, however, can quickly become tedious, especially as your account gains traction and more accounts reference yours. Optimizing your Twitter profile is crucial here.
Instead of embarking on the impossible task of manually watching all of your notifications, you can use a scraper to analyze the nature of your mentions. It is imperative to know where you stand with your customers, and you can find gaps in your current strategy for your brand-building. You can check your mentions as often as you find it necessary to reorganize your brand.
Not only this, but imagine all the different possible ways that your brand can be mentioned. Not everyone who is talking about your blog is going to tag you – or even spell your name correctly! Imagine how long it would take to think up every possible permutation and then go through them. A web scraping tool can allow you to plug all this in and get the results you need out the other end. Some of the higher end tools can even learn as they go and figure out what sorts of mentions are and aren’t about your brand or blog.
Know your competition
Scraping is also a superior technique for keeping track of your competitors without having to follow them. You can do this in the same kind of way that you stay informed about the influencers in your field. You can find out which of their posts people respond the most to, and when those people respond, you can also connect with the people they are connected to.
Scrape your way to the top!
You have probably tried to monitor your impression on Twitter before, but found it impossible to keep up with all of your notifications or exhausting to scroll through the timelines of your competitors. With the help of some basic automation, you can stay ahead of the twists and turns of your corner of the market.
Integrating scraping information into your Twitter marketing strategy is crucial to making efficient use of your time. Especially as a small blogger, you simply do not have enough hours in the day to go through and do all the necessary research manually to figure out the sorts of Twitter marketing insights that you need. Intelligent use of an automated scraping tool then is a must for your blog! Go on, scrape your way to the top!