How To Find Influential People Who May Be Tweeting Your Content

A Story Of How I Found An Influencer Who Tweeted My Article To 276,000 Readers

Thursday afternoon I was going about my business as usual, and happened to open my Google Analytics app to see how traffic was doing. It’s something I do two or three times a day, and you’ll soon see why.

Up until a few moments before, traffic for the day was fairly steady and predictable. But then there was a spike. Right around two o’clock, quite a few more visitors started coming in… about twice as many as the previous hour, in fact.

You can see the impressive increase here:

And this is exactly the kind of thing I’m looking for when I glance at my analytics. I’m looking to see if, during the day, anything had happened that was of interest. And a sudden spike in traffic is definitely of interest.

I hadn’t published anything new, of course, which certainly would have explained a spike. No, rather, this was to an existing piece of content. So I scrolled down the app to an area that shows me which pages of the site are performing best right now, and there at the top was an article published last weekend.

This was a high-performing piece on the state of Blab, the live streaming video network, and it was a newsjacking article. Normally, those posts peak within the first 24 – 48 hours and then die off as interest in the news wains. So you can imagine my surprise to see it suddenly trending again, days later.

In my experience, that’s almost always due to a single person sharing that article, or at least sparking a new round of social interest. The kind of person we refer to as an “influencer” because when they say or share something, they have a significantly large and engaged audience who is paying attention and responds.

It’s a wonderful thing, for a blogger. The traffic is nice, of course, but what’s best is the feeling you get when you know that someone important thought enough of your work to share it.

When Mari Smith is kind enough to share one of my articles on Facebook with my audience, I can tell right away, and it’s awesome. It’s extremely gratifying to know that Mari is willing to share my writing with her audience, essentially putting her name behind it, and recommending that they read it.

But what happens when you don’t know who shared the article? Since I’m following Mari anyways, I always know when she shares something. But other times, I have no idea. Google Analytics does not report specific social network post URLs, just the network.

This time, the traffic was coming predominantly from Twitter, so I thought I’d check to see if I was mentioned in a share. Alas, that was not the case. Some nice folks had shared many of my recent articles and mentioned me, but mostly other content, and none had the kind of following you’d need to drive so much traffic.

But then I found it. I found the tweet that started it all, and I am going to share with you how that happened and the tool that made it possible.

Read more here

How To Find Influential People Who May Be Tweeting Your Content