Here’s why measuring influence on social media is more important than ever

People have been trying to measure influence online for a good few years now. Remember people asking what your Klout score was? Does it really matter? It’s a reality that everything you do online gets recorded and adds some sort of value to your digital footprint.

Your blog posts, content that you curate, tweets, Facebook updates, LinkedIn, and Google+ adds some sort of value to your online image. Influence on the social web adds another layer to measure the ROI of social media.

What is influence? In plain English; Influence is the ability to influence (affect) others in their actions and thoughts. Since social media adds to your digital footprint, many businesses are using very complex algorithms to come up with simple answers to measure the value of their social media influence. This is a new playing field for many and it will most likely change in the future. Find below a couple of tips to help you get started with this.

Measuring numbers
There are many different ways to measure your influence and the most popular is to use 3rd party tools that assigns a number to influence based on factors such as number of connections, popularity, and share of conversation. There are many tools available online that you can use such as Technorati that measures the influence of your blog and ones that measures your social media activity such as Klout.

Monitoring tools

Social media influence can also be measured using monitoring (listening) tools that measure how brands are talked about across all the popular social media channels. There are many tools available such as the free online one SocialMention to more expensive monitoring tools such as Radian6 and BrandsEye. Webfluential is a new player on the market that’s also making waves. Many businesses that are already using these tools are only using them to counter negative feedback (ORM), but they can also be used to monitor and measure influence.

Social media influence is presented in the form of figuring out who is actually engaging with you and who you should be engaging with. I believe strongly that social media should never be measured in its own silo as it supports all of your other marketing initiatives. Social influence should also be measured as part of an integrated marketing strategy and not be measured on its own.

How to measure social media influence

If you want to start measuring influence, but don’t have a clue how, firstly look at who you are exactly. You can measure this through questions, polls, and surveys where you can ask your audience what they think of you. Do they respect and trust you? An easy way to start with this is by launching a survey before you start with a marketing campaign over a period of time and then another one after the campaign has finished. What was the sentiment analysis over this period? Did your positive mentions increase or did you receive more negative comments that you didn’t respond to?