Use Twitter to source expert quotes

Business Benefits

Improve your content strategy, brand awareness, and brand reputation.


Decide on a primary purpose for sharing expert quotes from Twitter.

For example, you might want to:

  • Expand your brand presence and reach.
  • Increase engagement with your target audience.
  • Help you build a relationship with the industry leader or influencer.
  • Build your thought leadership status by adding your own commentary to a respected industry leader’s ideas.
  • Provide valuable and authoritative information to your audience.
  • Create an opportunity to promote your own related content.

Find industry leaders or influencers to follow on Twitter by using native search for industry-related keywords or job titles , Twitter lists, or a third-party research tool.

Look for verified accounts within your industry that:

  • Have a larger follower count than your own.
  • Complement rather than compete with your brand.

After you’ve identified industry leaders you’d like to follow, extend your search to other influencers within their network. Go to their Twitter profile and open the Options menu in the top right corner. Select View Lists or Lists they’re on to look for other authoritative industry leaders they’re connected with.

Alternatively, use a research tool to search for influencers and industry leaders within your industry:

  • Buzzsumo: Conduct a search for relevant people within your industry based on a topic or keyword. View their Twitter bios, follower counts, and reply-to-retweet ratios.
  • Followerwonk: View social authority rankings to identify industry leaders to connect with and access social growth analytics features for your Twitter account.
  • Klear: Filter your influencer search by keyword, location, social channel, skills, and influencer type (from novice to celebrity status). View their Twitter bios, follower counts, and response rates.

Conduct keyword research, so you know what types of quotes to look for.

Use seed keywords in keyword research to identify long-tail keywords. For example, if your business sells printers, the word printer would be a seed keyword. You can input that into a keyword research tool to come up with relevant long-tail keywords. Popular tools include:

  • Google Keyword Planner: A free tool that identifies relevant keywords for your brand or industry. Keyword Planner can also provide search volumes for keywords.
  • MOZ Keyword Explorer: A free tool that suggests keywords, along with their search volume and difficulty, and performs competitive keyword analysis
  • KeywordTool.io: A paid tool (with limited free features) that suggests keywords and hashtags for Twitter. It also shows how search volumes for keywords have changed over the past 12 months.

Identify quote-worthy Tweets that contain or relate to your chosen keywords with Twitter’s advanced search. Use a social media listening tool to track keyword-specific conversations and identify relevant hashtags to follow.

Use Twitter advanced search to conduct a manual search for specific accounts, keywords, and hashtags. Alternatively, use a tool designed for social media listening, such as:

  • TweetDeck: A free tool that can track keyword, hashtag, or brand mentions. You can also use TweetDeck to create saved searches and manage multiple Twitter accounts on one dashboard.
  • Twilert: A paid tool to create Twitter alerts for mentions of keywords, hashtags, or brands. The alerts are delivered to you via email in real-time or at scheduled times.
  • Hootsuite: A paid tool (with limited free features) that allows you to create streams based on specific keywords or hashtags. You can also use Hootsuite to monitor mentions of keywords and manage multiple social accounts on one dashboard.

Share expert quotes with your audience through a quote tweet, or quote the original tweet and link back to it from one of your blog posts.

A quote tweet is like a retweet, except that you can add your own caption to it. This includes hashtags, a link, or CTA within a 280-character limit. This is an excellent way to add value to an expert quote. Alternatively, share the tweet on another platform like Facebook or embed it within another type of content, such as a blog post.

Like and comment on the industry leader’s original Tweet to build awareness, expand your reach, and forge a positive relationship with the influencer.

Monitor the engagements on each post, either natively on the Twitter app, on another platform where you’ve shared the original Tweet, or through a social media management platform.

Track and analyze the performance of content with quoted tweets to determine which topics or keywords resonate most with your audience.

Use Twitter Analytics or a third-party analytics platform connected to your Twitter account to get actionable insights. Alternatively, use Google Analytics to monitor the performance of blog content that includes quoted tweets from industry experts.

During a social media audit, review the engagement metrics for this type of content, such as impressions, likes, comments, shares, or CTA click-through rates. Based on the content’s performance, you can adjust any necessary keywords and optimize the sharing of content with sourced quotes from industry leaders.

Last edited by @hesh_fekry 2023-11-14T10:55:29Z