Identifying Influencers and Measuring Influence

Welcome back to our weekly social media tips. In previous tips, blogposts and speaking gigs, people have often asked me how to find influencers that are relevant for their businesses. This short video is a quick’n'dirty recap of how I define influence, and some tips on identifying influencers in your social media stream, measuring their influence, as well as some things you can do to work with them.

To identify influencers:

• Your social media monitoring platform should have some kind of influencer identification tool. In this clip, I head over to Attensity360 and examine a couple of reports that can help you identify who the influencers are.
• With Attensity, you can use reports like “Top sources” and “Top authors” to identify top contributors by frequency. You can also identify top blogs (using the impact metric) and “tweeps” (using Klout score), in the list view of articles, which is obtainable from most reports.

To measure influence:

• Tools like Klout (our partner; integrated into Attensity360) and PeerIndex are some of my recommendations. They both take a topical and multi-dimensional approach (Klout looks at a variety of variables from the number of lists you are on, to influence level of your network, to engagement levels with your content)
• Many tools give you a composite score. To find the score of an individual, just input the social handle. To get access to topical lists of influencers, you need to contact the score provider directly.

When an influencer has a positive experience with your product, he / she may choose to talk about you to her network. Here are some quick tips on how to build this kind of relationship:

• Make sure to research each blogger / content producer thoroughly.
• Never pitch, but rather build a relationship over time.
• Make sure that the relationship makes sense, and that your product is aligned with this person’s interests.
• Invite them “under the fold” and collaborate with them on the ideal product. They are usually experts, and want their opinions to be respected and considered. Besides, you will get some great feedback early.
• Send them products ahead of the general release time.
• Get feedback, listen to it and really hear it.
• Just like with any other customer, build a unique and customized experience. If you want someone to rave about you, make sure the experience is worthy of praise.