It’s no secret that search is going is social. Influence in social media is already a part of what drives page ranking at Google and Bing.
There are more great tools out there than ever before, so we’re going to cover 5 ways to measure your online influence in 2011. Get these services into your social media vocabulary and start using at least a couple of these tools in tracking your social efforts.
The idea of ‘influence’ has it’s own set of vocabulary terms as you will find using these services. Each has a definition for different metrics like amplitude, engagement, audience, even sentiment. If you’re looking for ways to increase your influence, one of these tools will have the metrics you’ll want to be watching.
- PostRank: PostRank offers an amazing amount of data to you about the content and posts on your website. PostRank takes your blog entries and analyzes them chiefly for engagement, but provides other metrics as well. You can sort your posts to see which articles are drawing the best attention in social media outlets, which is great for helping you hone your voice and find your best topics. Additionally, PostRank has a really simple way to connect you Google Analytics account to it’s service, allowing for even more detailed analytics information.
- PeerIndex: PeerIndex offers a fantastic array of influence metrics on your various social networks. Easily connect your profiles and pages and PeerIndexanalyzes them for activity, audience, authority and even offers a break down of your ‘topic fingerprint’ which is a neat visual display of your resonance rank in various topic communities.
Which topics do you want to own? - Klout: Klout has long been the go-to place for measuring social influence and it continues to be a great service, even if others are catching up in terms of function. Klout helped define the ways in which we measure online influence and “uses over 35 variables on Facebook and Twitter to measure True Reach, Amplification Probability, and Network Score.“
- SocialMention: Dubbed “Real-time social media search and analysis”, SocialMention looks more like a search engine than a influence service. However, a simple search of your keywords, say ‘salty waffle’ in our case, brings back some great real-time social results. Their metrics include strength, sentiment, passion, offers a list of top keywords associated with your search, and evens offers your most associated Twitterhashtags. Widgets and alerts offer a nice way to track real-time buzz with the service as well.
Better info, better content - Sprout Social: Sprout Social has maybe the best user interface of these options and gives you a nice dashboard with which to look at what they call ‘Social Stats’. Two simple grades on “Engagement” and “Influence” are coupled with nice demographics on your audience as well as Twitter statistics and a great set of tabs for monitoring all of your recent social activity and tracking contacts. Sprout Social is also a full service Twitter client allowing you to compose, schedule, and otherwise monitor and maintain tweets.
A couple other options are TweetLevel when it gets back online with the Twitter API and Traakr if you don’t mind paying or can get a free demo.
We hope you can use these tools to help get a picture of where you stand as an influencer in social media. Having all of this information gives you the opportunity to identify potential places for improvement, hone your social presence, provide to customers better through better content, and boost your overall influence and expert status online.
