In the world of social media, influence is a totally different game. Influence on social media can be defined by the number of fans and followers the user has, or the amount of likes and retweets they get from their posts.
Influence on social media is extremely powerful. With 1.23 billion monthly users on Facebook, 271 million Twitter users, 150 million Instagram users, social media has a massive reach worldwide. Top tier influential users have the ability to start a social movement, appear on headline news, or raise more than $100 million dollars with just a simple post or tweet.
When you successfully engage an influential user, you have not just managed to engage one customer – you have managed to engage the thousands of users that follow your influential user. A friend of mine who runs a start up business for yacht chartering managed to increase their followers ten-folded simply by using five Instagram posts from an influential user.
In the real world, it is hard to measure the amount of influence a person has. However, as with most things on the Internet, influence on social media is easily calculated. In view of the influencer’s level of interconnectedness, substance, and depth in the industry, here are 3 tools that calculate the amount of influence your fan has:
Klout
Klout was developed to “measure your ability to drive action”. It measures influence via three different categories:
- True Reach
- Amplification
- Network Impact.
True Reach refers to the number of people a user can potentially reach out to. The important figures are the numbers of people who engage with a user’s posts on different social media platforms.
The Amplification metric gauges how much influence a user has on his/her network. It tells you how well a user engages with followers in terms of replies and comments.
Lastly, Network Impact refers to the influence of the other users within a user’s True Reach. To increase this score, users must interact with other influential people on their networks.
Klout combines the scores form these three metrics to provide you with an overall score that gives you an idea of how much influence a user has.
PeerIndex
PeerIndex measures a user’s online authority. It also reflects the effect of online activities and the amount of social capital earned on the Internet.
This software calculates social capital reputation such as:
- authority
- audience scores
- realness
- topic resonance
- activity
Authority is the measure of trust. It calculates how much you can rely on a user’s actions to resonate within the community based on acceptance and interaction.
Audience score counts the number of fans and those who are receptive to a user’s posts and actions. Spam accounts, trolls, and bots are not filtered and do not contribute to the score. PeerIndex also counts how much activity is appropriate.
Realness, gauges the likelihood of whether a profile belongs to a real person, and is not a spam bot, troll, or Twitter feed. This metric’s main objective is to penalise fake accounts that are created to boost popularity and disrupt the community.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a very important tool in social media because it gives you an idea of how your brand is perceived in the non-social media world. When looking out for influencers, you should look beyond their reach in social media. Their SEO scores and blog/website traffic are important factors to consider as well.
Google Analytics has also reinvented its metrics in order to accommodate social media, mainly because of Google+. Despite being less popular than Facebook and Twitter, Google+ is a good platform to find influencers as you can connect to people who are key personalities in the industry.
In the world of social media, influence is currency. Traditional marketing and advertising have little power on social media. The influencers run the show. Engaging influencers can bring higher exposure, higher reach, and higher profits.
It all starts with identifying the influencer within your circle of fans. An easy way to begin is to run a Facebook Post by asking your fans are bloggers or have any form of large-scale distribution. If need be it will also be useful to run Facebook Ads targeting towards your fans.
Once you’ve identified them, use these three tools above to determine if your influencers really have authority over their distribution.
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