Earth Observation Influencers 2020

How to get +100 Twitter subscribers organically, bring real value to a community, and get to know all the key influencers — all just in one day. Here’s the story.

I've started with this blog about 6 months ago, and soon I realised that most of my audience and experts are on Twitter. Therefore, I tried to be more or less active there: tweeting and sharing my work, following the key experts, liking and commenting.

It was a New Year’s Eve when I came up with a new idea: a list on Twitter with Influencers in Earth Observation to follow in 2020. Immediately, I made a call for contributors - asked people to mention their favourite accounts. Next morning, I was amazed to see that the whole thing went viral!

Hey, Twitter! Which accounts in #Space and #EarthObservation to follow in 2020? Let's build a thread.

— Ilya Bolkhovsky (@bolkhovsky) December 30, 2019

A few retweets by influencers with tens of thousands of followers brought enormous visibility — those 6 months of engagement were worth it!

All that day I kept adding people to the list, and soon it grew over 200. I’ve also tried to follow every other person and often got followed back. It was an incredible growth hacking experience achieved in such a short period of time!

I think that happened because of this simple initiative offered real value both to the community and individuals. People want to keep up with the trends, updates from the industry experts; most importantly, also to be on the radar.

These days the domain of Earth Observation is experiencing enormous growth. First time in history, we have such an incredible amount of freely available satellite data. At the same time, there are emerging issues that demand insights from that data. Insights from experts.

This list makes an attempt to unify the relatively new and yet somehow segmented community of earth scientists, engineers, developers, business- and marketing agents.

Now, there’s another great opportunity to maximise the value. I am planning to do the interviews with people from the list. The interviews should introduce experts, as well as newcomers, to the community.

That's a win-win! Do you agree?